Two years before The Soft Bulletin, The Flaming Lips released the divisive Zaireeka, a four-disc record that was designed to be played simultaneously on four seperate players. “It’s really too much to contemplate, because then you’ve just got to… y’know, what do you do? What do you do after that?” Check out ‘Buggin”: We would have never, ever dreamed or ever thought that we would be able to say, ‘yeah, we have a record that’s like that’. “I think that if it would have been too overwhelmingly celebrated, it probably couldn’t have worked. “In the beginning, we wouldn’t have wanted it to seem like a Velvet Underground record where people listen to it because it’s cool, you know? I want people to listen to it because they need that moment, that little help, or whatever it is its comforting little message. “I think Steven and I both understand why people listen to it. “But, I think as time has gone by, I do understand what it is that The Soft Bulletin imparts to a sensitive, intense person, and what it helps them with,” Coyne admits. We were just on to the next thing, you know?” “We were just so immersed in songs and creating sounds and making albums that we didn’t really even think about that we had to be the dudes that made this record. “I mean, we had already started to make the next record - the Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots record - even before came out. “We would have never accepted, or we didn’t even want to accept at the time, that people would say, ‘hey, this is an important record’,” he explains. To Coyne, these sessions were relatively run-of-the-mill, with no indication that they were witnessing the creation of a genre-defining release. “But, I would say that I think it took a lot of time for it to seem like it is that type of record, which we’re relieved of.”Īt the time that the band were making what would eventually be considered a classic record, they had already begun to look forward to what the future held. We didn’t really expect anybody else in the world to really care, you know? But, I think we’re very lucky that at the right time it just hit certain people. “You just make it with your heart and soul, and we were really just making it because we liked it. “Since it was so long ago, there are, really, elements of it that you kind of just accept we did make it, but we didn’t make it thinking, ‘oh, it’s going to be compared to Pet Sounds,’ and stuff like that. “Well, now that it’s twenty years afterwards, you start to get a little bit more used to what people mean by that,” he explains. However, as Wayne Coyne explains, while he understands the legacy, he notes that this was never the intention of the band when they first hit the studio. In fact, response to the record was so great that it has since gone on to be considered as one of the greatest albums of all time, with some critics labelling it as the “ Pet Sounds of the ’90s”. When The Soft Bulletin was first released, few could have expected the impact it would have in the ensuing years and decades. Check out The Flaming Lips’ ‘Race For The Prize’: To celebrate these upcoming shows, we chatted to frontman Wayne Coyne to discuss how an album so majestic and revered was delivered by a humble rock band from Oklahoma. Now, more than 20 years since The Flaming Lips shared was has been called their magnum opus, the group will make their return to Australia in September to perform the record in its entirety. In fact, publications like Pitchfork – who gave Zaireeka a rare 0/10 rating – cited the album as one of the greatest of all-time, honouring it with an equally-rare 10/10 rating. However, when The Soft Bulletin was finally unleashed onto the world, the overall reception was unanimously positive. By the time 1997’s highly-experimental Zaireeka had divided critics across the board, fans didn’t know what to expect. Having flirted with mainstream success following 1993’s Transmissions From The Satellite Heart, their Clouds Taste Metallic follow-up in 1995 didn’t quite make the sort of splash that the record executives might have hoped for.
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