How grief fueled The Flaming Lips’ breakthrough album, ‘The Soft Bulletin’: “There’s a big void”
It looked for a while there like The Flaming Lips were going to be remembered predominantly as the ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ band, a bunch of weirdos who rode the alternative wave of the early 1990s to a novelty radio hit, landing them somewhere between Dishwalla, 4 Non Blondes, and Blind Melon in the hierarchy of fleeting nostalgic relevance.
Then, in 1999, something quite strange and unexpected happened; The Flaming Lips, already perfectly content with their cult following and low profile after 15 years as a band, touched a nerve with their ninth studio album, and suddenly, people who’d already written them off as one-hit wonders, or who’d found them too bizarre, noisy, and lyrically unrelatable, were finding something new to latch on to.
The Soft Bulletin was the album that launched the second half of The Flaming Lips’ career and re-crafted their image for the 2000s, transforming them into the ultimate feel-good, life-affirming, animal suit-wearing pop architects of their era, armed with big, soaring songs about big, heavy subjects, and sometimes robots.
Frontman Wayne Coyne knew the record was a shift, but the reaction to it still caught him off guard a bit, particularly as so many new listeners, the majority of whom had never heard the band’s lone 1993 hit ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’, started reaching out to him personally to say what the album meant to them.
“People are moved by The Soft Bulletin,” Coyne told the Hartford Courant in 2000, “and are profoundly affected by it. There are people I talk to every day who say it reflects their life experiences.”
While much of The Soft Bulletin has a bright and shimmering, almost Christmasy feel to it, with loads of literal bells and whistles, several of the songs, including standout tracks ‘Waiting for a Superman’ and ‘Spoonful Weighs a Ton’, were written about the recent death of Coyne’s father. What those songs manage to achieve is something that would become a Flaming Lips trademark: using joyful noise to venture into dark subject matter.
“People who have had close ones die feel a powerful thing,” Coyne said, “There’s a big void, and some people told us the music we did seems to be filling that void. One thing we’ve always tried is to never hold back from reaching for more than we can grasp. On Soft Bulletin, you can hear that… You can hear people on this record reaching, struggling to be better than we actually are. In our restlessness, sometimes we go for things, and by accident we sometimes get them.”
One of the musicians “struggling” alongside Coyne on The Soft Bulletin was Steven Drozd, who recently announced his departure from the Lips after more than 30 years in the group, an announcement that packed a genuine punch for longtime fans, largely because of how impactful Drozd’s work on records like this one has remained over the ensuing years.
As Drozd told the Fort Worth Star Telegram in 2006, “That album [The Soft Bulletin] changed a lot of things—for us, for our fans, for our career”.
