Oklahoma psych kings the Flaming Lips have been around since 1983 — a mind-boggling fact, given they’ve been shedding members and tweaking their sound for most of that time. They formed around the eccentric vision of frontman and chief instigator Wayne Coyne, who guided the group’s early voyages through harsh, experimental noise (Telepathic Surgery) and warped pop melodies (In a Priest Driven Ambulance).
Back in the early ’90s heyday of true alternative rock, they even managed to sign with a major label, Warner Bros., who’ve bankrolled the Lips’ cosmic creations ever since. But there was one other chief addition: Multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd joined for their 1993 breakout LP, “Transmissions From the Satellite Heart“, which spawned the fuzzy earworm “She Don’t Use Jelly.” And the Coyne-Drozd partnership has anchored the band ever since, through grand art-pop explorations (1999’s “The Soft Bulletin“, electronic dream-pop (2002’s “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” and stately psychedelia (2020’s “American Head“.
If the average listener had had the four CD players playing simultaneously required to listen to Oklahoma psych-rock band The Flaming Lips‘ 1997 album “Zaireeka”, we might have seen it coming, but for most of us “The Soft Bulletin” was a beautiful sucker punch, a smack upside the head with a rainbow. What happened to the band that sang “This Here Giraffe,” “The Magician vs. the Headache,” and “She Don’t Use Jelly”?
This was an album of deep thoughts, boundless empathy and the weight of the world on its shoulders, all set to wonderful melodies and inventive widescreen sonics. Sixteen years into their career, on their ninth album, and as frontman Wayne Coyne was nearing 40, The Flaming Lips delivered their masterpiece.
“We were a not very successful weirdo rock group about to get dropped from our label,” Coyne said in a documentary about the album, setting the scene in 1996. A lot of things happened simultaneously to the group that led to their near total transformation. Guitarist Ronald Jones, who had been a big part of the Lips’ sound in the first half of the ’90s, quit the band, making room for Steven Drozd to fully assume the role as musical director. He was the drummer, but also a polymath multi-instrumentalist genius. Meanwhile, Coyne became more interested in non-band musical ideas. He hit on an idea where The Flaming Lips would take different elements of a song and put them separately on dozens of cassettes to be played at the same time on dozens of car stereos while he orchestrated the whole thing like a conductor at a symphony. The “Parking Lot Experiments” became cult events which then led to the bigger and more portable “Boombox Experiments,” which led to Coyne wondering “Can we make an album this way?” and then “Will they let us make an album this way?”
The band, along with producer/collaborator David Fridmann and manager Scott Booker, talked Warner Brothers into letting them do it on the condition that simultaneously and on the same budget they would make a “normal” album that only required one CD player / tape deck to listen to it.
To facilitate this, Fridmann built his own studio, Tarbox Road, in Cassadaga, NY, and The Flaming Lips would be the first to use it. Free of hourly studio rates, they had unlimited time to test out what the studio could do while working on songs. Coyne set down some rules for the recordings, namely no distorted guitar. He hoped to find a new way to bring about the same effect that loud-quiet-loud had served. To achieve it, Drozd, Fridmann and bassist Michael Ivins turned to synthesizers, new digital technology, and a lot of creative inspiration. “Though we were using the most modern synthesizers and digital junk that you could get at the time, we were trying to make it sound like it wasn’t a band any more,” Coyne said in 2019. “We wanted it to be more of an emotional sound than a band.”
On that emotional front, a lot was happening personally to the members of The Flaming Lips. Coyne’s father was dying of cancer and passed during the making of the albums. Drozd confronted his heroin addiction after he almost had his hand amputated from what he thought was a spider bite that turned out to be an infection from intravenous drug use. Ivins nearly died in a freak auto accident. (Many of these real life occurrences turn up in The Soft Bulletin’s “The Spiderbite Song.”) Things were getting heavy and Coyne stopped writing about absurdist, weirdo ideas (like Giraffes) and began writing from the heart. It was still from his psychedelic mind, but pondering the mysteries of the universe by way of his own experiences with death, grief, and despair led to wonderfully off-kilter yet highly relatable songs with real staying power.
“Theirs is to win, if it kills them,” he sings on the album’s first single and opening track, “Race for the Prize,” a song which also introduces us to the new sonic world of The Flaming Lips that is closer to Phil Spector and Brian Wilson than to Nirvana or Dinosaur Jr. “They’re just humans with wives and children” is an unlikely shout-along anthemic chorus, but there’s no denying it works.
The album’s other single, “Waitin’ for a Superman,” is as much a moving rumination on grief against seemingly insurmountable odds as R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” is, but without being so obvious about it. “Tell everybody waitin’ for Superman, that they should try to hold on as best they can / He hasn’t dropped them, forgot them, or anything / It’s just too heavy for Superman to lift.”
The rest of the album is just as wonderful. “A Spoonful Weighs a Ton” covers similar thematic territory as “Superman,” but plays as Disney music by way of John Bonham. Drozd’s drumming is the most awesomely bashed, impactful playing of the ’90s that wasn’t recorded by Steve Albini. Those drums really bring the album to life, juxtaposed against the orchestra of warbly synths and layers of harmonies that may at times fool you — like on “The Spark That Bled” — into thinking there was an actual orchestra involved. No violins were harmed during the making of this record, but many drum heads died so that these songs may live.
“The Spark That Bled” and many others on “The Soft Bulletin” take surprising zigs and zags that would seem insane on paper and sound like they were just born that way. “What is the Light,” one of the album’s sunniest pop songs, transitions into pensive instrumental “The Observer” which you could imagine sound tracking an arthouse sci-fi film or an episode of Cosmos. Need some Grand Guignol honky-tonk loneliness? “Suddenly Everything Has Changed” is there for you. Gospel? “The Gash” makes room for that alongside phantasmagoric Morricone-style bombast and ’80s orchestra hit samples in a song that asks “Will the fight for our sanity be the fight of our lives lives / now that we’ve lost all the reasons that we thought we had?”
“Suddenly Everything Has Changed” was a pivotal moment in the making of the album. Reflecting on the song recently, Coyne said he had the verses figured out but suggested to Drozd that the song could, after the refrain, could go into “an expansive emotional, cinematic moment,” but “we didn’t really consider how unexpected this interlude is…but for us it fit perfectly with the idea of suddenly everything changes. And it kind of felt like we were doing our own thing, like no other group would wanna do something like this .. we were making our own world.”
The album closes as brilliantly as it opens with “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate,” arguably “The Soft Bulletin‘s” best song, where Coyne ponders all the Big Questions (life, death, the universe, everything) in just four lines that are both entirely psychedelic and entirely grounded: “Love in our life is just too valuable / Oh, to feel for even a second without it / But life without death is just impossible / Oh, to realize something is ending within us.” It finishes with a repeated refrain of the title against a galaxy of “ahhs,” and a very groovy bassline from Ivins and Drozd’s slide guitar. “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” then segues into another instrumental, “Sleeping on the Roof,” that sounds like looking at the stars on the hottest day of the summer as you drift off into slumber.
“The Soft Bulletin” when I hear it now it really is about despair, but there’s no despair in it,” Coyne said in 2019. “It’s not singing about despair, it’s being in despair and singing.” And finding beauty and hope in all of it.
The Fat Angel Sings 