It’s a terrifying realization at first, but then it becomes hopeful. The one thing we’ve always thought would save us is gone, and all we’re left with is each other. “Waiting for Superman” takes a similar idea and stretches it wider. The “cure for all mankind” Coyne imagines would presumably begin with the cure of a single patient, and anyone who has spent too much time in hospital can tell you how the mind works when confronted with a terminal diagnosis for someone you care about: Can’t anybody do something? All this technology can’t fix it? We could view it as a cartoon, but inside of the whimsy looms something serious. So the opening “Race for the Prize,” which begins with that unforgettable drum crash, piano run, and string sounds that seem to balloon outward from the explosion of the percussion, seems at first like the kind of lighthearted fantasy the band had made their name with earlier - “Lightning Strikes the Postman,” say. It’s impossible to travel to any one idea without touching on others along the way. The songs on The Soft Bulletin cluster around a handful of thematic centers - love, death, consciousness, physics - which spread out like a neural web or a subway map or a constellation. “But at the time, I’m not thinking that I was writing about that, because these things happen to everybody.” “In the beginning, I’m writing about this aftermath of my father - songs about his illness, and then about his death,” he tells me. Yes, it was a precarious time for everyone involved, but nothing they had done to that point was easy. Speaking to Coyne via telephone from his home in Oklahoma City, he remembers the turmoil of the moment and also plays it down. Absent Jones’ irreplaceable guitar, they would think in terms of arrangements, shifting the focus of their songs to keyboards, strings, and horns. Out of these happenings, they began to develop an idea of what the next phase of The Flaming Lips might sound like. Working informally in Oklahoma City, they began filling cassette tapes with strange music - fragments of songs, sound effects, drones - and constructed events in parking garages where the tapes would be played in car stereos of a few dozen volunteers and then the concrete structure would be transformed into a collective art installation. “It’s an album you return to and hear differently as your own life moves forward and endings of every kind become all too real, a reminder that this flash of now is all we will ever have.”ĭuring this tense period, when The Flaming Lips weren’t sure what would come next, Coyne, Drozd, and bassist Michael Ivins experimented. And bandleader Wayne Coyne’s father was diagnosed with cancer in October 1996 and then died three months later. Ronald Jones, the brilliant guitarist whose leads and textures had been one of the group’s sonic signatures, left the group Warner Bros., The Flaming Lips’ label, was in turmoil following reorganization and some of the band’s initial champions departed Steven Drozd, the superstar drummer, had a growing drug problem.
#FLAMING LIPS SOFT BULLETIN DEMASTERED PATCH#
Their next album, Clouds Taste Metallic, didn’t sell nearly as well, and after a lengthy tour supporting it, they hit a patch of trouble. By the mid-1990s, The Flaming Lips had been playing music together for a long time and they lucked into a certain amount of success when “She Don’t Use Jelly,” from their 1993 album Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, became a whimsical MTV-fueled novelty hit.
One way to understand why The Soft Bulletin has endured is to go back to the anxious period it emerged from.
By some measures, 20 years is the length of a generation, enough time to reflect on those around you who were born and grew up and grew old and those who might not be around anymore. Twenty-year anniversaries are the best album anniversaries - long enough to say the album truly comes from another world, but not so long ago that this particular world is entirely unfamiliar.
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