![]() Thus, it proved to be a natural coda for the evening and, with cannons of confetti firing away, it was an inspiring mix of celebration and catharsis, reflection and release.The Soft Bulletin is one of the Flaming Lips’ most popular and best-selling albums. Maybe that, in the end, is the bulletin.”Īfter delivering the album in its entirety – and then some – the Lips encored with the only non- Bulletin cut of the evening, “Do You Realize?” Written for The Soft Bulletin’s follow-up, the song deals with many of the same themes that were recurrent throughout the performance it is a meditation on the frailty and impermanence of life. We are the ones that can turn on our light and the light of those around us. but we are the ones that can make the world happy and beautiful. ![]() ![]() The Soft Bulletin says we don’t have a choice. When the crowd started booing that tragic observation, Coyne quickly explained, “We don’t want to think that’s true, but there are a lot of horrible things out there that affect all of us. I’m so glad.”Ĭlimate-Themed Fest With Sheryl Crow, Flaming Lips, the Roots Postponed It is, in some ways, the Flaming Lips’ own Dark Side of the Moon – that Pink Floyd album that the Lips also happen to sometimes cover live, in its entirety.ĭuring “The Spiderbite Song,” a track which many fans have taken to be a metaphor for multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd’s well-documented drug problem, Coyne sang plaintively, “I was glad that it didn’t destroy you/ How sad that would be/ ‘Cause if it destroyed you/ It would destroy me.” Looking at Drozd, Coyne interjected, “I’m glad that it didn’t destroy Steven. But they treated the crowd at Bimbo’s 365 Club on Tuesday to what might amount to the album’s box set – including one of the only live performances of “Slow Motion” ever.Īs the album unfolded and the band expanded various parts to create something that flowed flawlessly – even victoriously – through all its emotional twists and turns, The Soft Bulletin revealed itself to be a genuinely perfect album, meant to be taken whole. While the band has performed the album perhaps more than a dozen times by Coyne’s count, they’ve rarely played all the songs from all the editions. Over the years, the Flaming Lips have released several different versions of The Soft Bulletin, with not all the songs making the cut on all the packages. Because it tells you to hang in there, motherfucker.” “Other people talk about God, but music is the god that I want to submit to and belong to and obey. ![]() “Without our songs, where the fuck would we be?” Coyne asked, rhetorically. But if you’re lucky like us, you get to go back and go, ‘Oh wow, that’s a really great part there! I mean, at the end of ‘Spoonful Weighs a Ton,’ I get to sing that great line: ‘Yelling hard as they can/ The doubters all were stunned/ Heard louder than a gun/ The sound they made was love.’ If we hadn’t written that song, I would want to sing that – it’s so good.” “That’s how all songs are – you do them, you record them, and then you move on to the next song. “I don’t think about these songs very often,” Coyne told Rolling Stone earlier in the day. The show was special not only because it marked the Flaming Lips’ long-awaited return to Noise Pop – in an intimate venue that only holds around 500 people – but also because they had announced they would be performing their 1999 masterpiece, The Soft Bulletin, in its entirety. Yes, at ringleader Wayne Coyne’s insistence, much of the audience participated in a loud, fake group orgasm after Coyne sang the life-affirming ending of “Spoonful Weighs a Ton” early in the night. The Flaming Lips kicked off the 20th edition of Noise Pop – a weeklong, citywide festival held in San Francisco each February – with a concert that was everything a rock concert should be: entertaining, poignant, silly, cathartic, psychedelic.
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