The Soft Bulletin Tracklist
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.
The album was released to wide critical acclaim and hailed by critics as a departure from their previous guitar-heavy alternative rock sound, into a more layered and intricately arranged work, with Pitchfork going so far as to give the album an incredibly rare 10/10, (The same website gave their previous album, Zaireeka, an even rarer 0/10.) and naming it the third best album of the 1990s.
The album was made during a rough time in the bands lives. Wayne Coyne was dealing with his father dying of cancer, Steven Drozd got a spiderbite that nearly caused his arm to be amputated (which later turned out to be caused by a heroin injection), and bassist Michael Ivins nearly died in a car accident (the latter two incidents being recalled in The Spiderbite Song.) Not only that, but the Lips relationship with Warner Bros was beginning to be tested after they released The Lips previous album Zaireeka, which was incredibly expensive to produce and highly experimental. Warner only agreed to make that album if they made this album on the same budget as Zaireeka, and letting the record label have control of the tracklist.
The Tracklist shown here is from the Vinyl release, which is the version the band always intended on releasing, as North America excludes Slow Motion but has The Spiderbite Song and two remixes at the end. While the International version has Slow Motion towards the beginning where The Spiderbite Song was and puts Buggin at the very end.
“The Soft Bulletin ” Q&A
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Why are there so many different track listings for the album?
As a compromise with Warner Bros Records. If they fund Zaireeka (A highly experimental and expensive album), Zaireeka and this album must be made on the same budget, and Warner Bros gets control of the tracklist; in case one of the songs becomes a hit in a certain market.
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What has Wayne Coyne said about the album?
We thought, “Well, we’re going to make this record and if it’s the last record we make and the world doesn’t need any more Flaming Lips' records we would know that we did the thing that we wanted to do.”
Previous to us making The Soft Bulletin we probably were wrongly, overly concerned with seeming like we were a cool weird rock group. We were working towards things that seemed more emotional and seemed based on the power of the melodies power of the chord structures and all this drama that we would put in it. We’re doing some of these tracks on The Soft Bulletin I hear now that are easily a couple of hundred tracks placing orchestral pieces, flutes, viola players and all this stuff, layering vocals that should be done by a forty piece choir but it’s us going in there overdubbing one at a time. All that didn’t seem like anything compared to the stuff we were doing Zaireeka. We’re used to lifting 10000 pounds and to just lift a thousand pounds seemed like nothing.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.
– Wayne Coyne, Yahoo
