"The Soft Bulletin" (1999): Flaming Lips' best album

The Flaming Lips received some radio playtime when its single ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ charted in 1993, but the success went as quickly as it came.

The band’s guitarist, Ronald, left a few years later, which led the band members to think about changing things up, starting with their sound, and they chose to do this by not getting a new guitarist. This change led to the album Zaireeka, an album of four CDs that were intended to be played all at the same time to create a stereo sound. The Soft Bulletin was written and recorded around the same time as Zaireeka. It might sound like a cliché, but you’ll never hear an album like The Soft Bulletin: symphonic art rock with a lot of melancholy and layering of sound. The Flaming Lips wrote it with the impression that if it failed then the record label would drop them, so as a last hurrah they went all out.

The Soft Bulletin is often compared to Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Both bands had distanced themselves from what they had done before to make a more orchestral album with a lot of layering of sounds and a more serious tone in lyrics. The album was impossible to re-create live as a band, and it would be incredibly expensive to play as it would need to hire musicians, so the band decided that it would have pre-recorded parts in place of instruments. However, to enhance the live performances, audience members could pick up receivers with headphones at the venues, and a transmitter would broadcast the performance to them, so they could hear everything perfectly while still feeling the music through the live sound system in the building.

The image on the album's sleeve came from a photo shoot used in a Life magazine article on LSD in 1966. Singer Wayne Coyne chose it, as he felt that the music fitted the image.