The Soft Bulletin

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Based on a True Story: "The Spiderbite Song" recounts two real life events that happened to members of the band: Steven Drozd's hand almost got amputated when he believed he was bitten by a spider (later discovered to be an abscess brought upon by his heroin addiction), whilst Michael Ivins and his wife had a freak automobile accident which caused them to be trapped in their car for several hours. Cohen, Jonathan (August 3, 2002). "Flaming Lips' New Warner Set Reminds Us To Live For The Now". Billboard. Vol.114, no.31. Nielsen Business Media, Inc. p.11 . Retrieved November 6, 2021. but at the same time I can understand why some prefer the previous edition. the sound scape and the concept of this album could be more fit into the previous editions. that being said, on precious mix everything was more harmonized into songs. nothing was prominent. should I say balanced? not exactly.

Terich, Jeff (April 5, 2012). "10 Essential Dream Pop Albums". Treble . Retrieved November 6, 2021. Yeah, I do. It’s something that I wanted when I was growing up. I never got to see Pink Floyd or The Beatles, but in my dreams I would have loved to have seen The Beatles play ‘The White Album’. Who wouldn’t, you know? I think we’re very capable of that stuff now. The guys in the group with the technology and all of the shit we have available to us now, it really is great to sing these songs with the arrangements and those kind of sounds. The record is saying, ‘You’ve got to love life as much as you can, and if something tears some of that away from you then that’s ‘The Soft Bulletin’. It’s ‘Oh no’. If you live, you love and you absolutely throw yourself into it then what if it dies? What choice do we have? Do we live half a life because we don’t want to get hurt so much? Do we love half a love because if might lose it?” So the bad is ultimately worth it for the good? There wasn’t a fear of failure, we just had to be sure that we wanted to make it.” – Wayne Coyne So the live shows just became more instinctual? Questioning Title?: "What is the Light?" (its subtitle provides the answer) and "Waitin' for a Superman (Is It Gettin' Heavy?)"

Track listing

Would he write a song with AI? “Um, probably not. Just because, we like writing songs. That’s part of the thrill of it. But I’m not opposed to it. I’ve never cared how you can arrive at your music. But there’s a lot of stuff that the robots can’t do for you. At some point in civilization, it must have seemed very advanced for someone to have paint and paintbrushes and canvases. But it doesn’t mean that everybody is a great painter.” Wayne Coyne: ‘I’ve never cared how you can arrive at your music’ (Photo: Press) Terich, Jeff (July 2, 2015). "10 Essential Neo-Psychedelia Albums". Treble . Retrieved November 6, 2021. The Soft Bulletin is the ninth album by The Flaming Lips, released by Warner Bros. Records on May 17, 1999 in the UK, Europe and Australia, and on June 22, 1999 in the United States. One of the Flaming Lips’ most charming songs, from 1995’s noise-pop spectacular Clouds Taste Metallic, with a premise so cosy and heartwarming it could be turned into a children’s picture book. It’s Christmas Eve, and a young Coyne decides to spread some Yuletide cheer to the local zoo by freeing all the animals. There’s just one snag: the critters don’t want his charity because, even though they’re miserable, they’d rather organise their own jailbreak and save themselves. “The elephants, orangutans / All the birds and kangaroos,” sings Coyne, over a sweet Beach Boys-like melody, underpinned by fuzzy, sludgy guitars and the sound of cymbals crashing like Christmas bells. “All said, ‘Thanks but no thanks, man / But to be concerned is good’.” In some parallel universe, listening to it every year on 24 December is as cherished a part of the Christmas ritual as watching The Snowman. 5. Thirty-Five Thousand Feet of Despair What Is the Light? (An Untested Hypothesis Suggesting That the Chemical [In Our Brains] by Which We Are Able to Experience the Sensation of Being in Love Is the Same Chemical That Caused the "Big Bang" That Was the Birth of the Accelerating Universe)" (4:05)

Fading into the Next Song: "What is the Light?" and "The Observer" are threaded together by an insistent thumping beat; and "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" and "Sleeping on the Roof" being threaded by the sound of bugs buzzing and Wayne's voice fading out.At the same time, we were working on The Soft Bulletin. Initially, The Soft Bulletin was meant to be largely a two‑mix version of Zaireeka, but then it sort of evolved into something else..." Soft Sounds

Once we started to play shows after putting up The Soft Bulletin we just weren’t that interested in playing shows and so our idea was, “well, if we’re gonna play shows, let’s just do whatever,” and that’s when I started to have hand puppets and throw confetti and balloons around. This is a very Coyne-ian way of seeing things. He tells me he isn’t a great musician – “Steven [Drodz, the band’s long-time multi-instrumentalist] is the level of a Miles Davis… embarrassingly I don’t even know the chords to ‘Do You Realize??’” – but his big thinking and idealist adventure has elevated The Flaming Lips into singular terrain, equally brilliant and bonkers, where the surreal meets the existential.I think ‘Zaireeka’ really freed us up. We got signed to Warner Bros in the early ‘90s, wanting them to succeed but not knowing how to do that. We knew there was a limit to that kind of freedom and we pushed that to the absolute limit when we made the ‘Zaireeka’. We were just looking at the future going ‘If we’re gonna make a record like ‘The Soft Bulletin’, why would they keep us?’” Make no mistake: The Flaming Lips were weird. And now they’d proven that they were capable of sonic brilliance, a revelation to the boy-band-clogged music world of 1999. The Flaming Lips, thanks to the record that Wayne Coyne thought no one would even be interested in, had finally arrived. DeRogatis remembers, now 20 years later: Aaliyah’s first union with Missy Elliott and Timbaland was a jolt, completely upending R&B through a collective vision of futurism, cyber goth, and sci-fi samples that remain virtually unmatched in scope and impact, as evidenced by the number of contemporary musicians still mining her catalog for inspiration. One in a Million arrived when R&B needed an overhaul, and Aaliyah was the perfect vessel: her breathy but assured alto gave her an aura of mystique, and she possessed a kind of reticence and remove even while singing about her own desire. (Furthering this mystique was the unfounded rumor that her signature side-part and sunglasses were hiding an amblyopic eye.) Her own reasons for this remain cause for speculation—she’d been illegally child-married to R. Kelly for less than a year when One in a Million came out—but the record was unmistakably the sound of her gaining her agency as a young woman and changing the course of music history, all before she even graduated from high school. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd