Thinking you are right without any proof (or without demanding any) is sometimes an early sign of schizophrenia… But also… Detaching one’s self from what you view as “ordinary people” around you… elevating yourself as a sort of “chosen one”… This is evidence of an egomaniac… So you have an egomaniac who thinks he’s right… That makes a schizophrenic egomaniac??? And so I believe some of the mythological dimensions of art and creativity will always be thought of as being born of this unpleasant, but apparently powerful, combination.

I have always argued that during the period after Clouds Taste Metallic we did not ascend to the upper level of our egos… I think we, as The Flaming Lips, simply went into the unknown.

Though it was releasedin1999, “The Soft Bulletin” truly began in 1996… But, I must say it was not something we had been trying to do all along as some have suggested… We really did not know where we would go… which was (at the time) very exhilarating!!!

You see… Ronald Jones’ departure(after “Clouds Taste Metallic” in 1996) really did come as a great disappointment. With him (and Steven) we had moved from being a freakish, guitar rock outfit to (I think) a more subtle and expressive and more unpredictable freakish, guitar outfit… Let it be said that during the Clouds Taste Metallic era we always felt we were having our heyday… And when his (Ronald’s) personality began to change (due to, in my opinion, occasional, mild bouts of schizophrenic episodes) he would become unreliable and… well… strange… But, really, I had seen a lot of strange behavior in my time and it didn’t really matter to me. He was, after all, much younger than me and I figured he would, sooner or later, adjust himself to whatever psychic stress he was having… and, even if he didn’t, we could adjust ourselves (me, Michael, Steven and Scott) to deal with it. We tried our best to get him to stay… But for whatever reason… he felt leaving was his only option. I knew even before Ronald left that we, as a band with a certain band structure, were about to change into something different. I said it then and I still say it now that Ronald would have loved being a part of this new phase… well musically anyway… but this was not to be. What choice did we have?

So we no longer had to adhere to the old band structure… we were just guys who made music and somehow we felt no obligation to continue on as we were… We saw new possibilities!! We immediately began doing recordings for, what would become, the first “Parking Lot Experiment.” One of the initial compositions was “Should We Keep The Severed Head Awake,” a sprawling twenty minute sound-story about trying to go to sleep one hot, summer night on the back roof of my house. It eventually evolved into (what was once) the last song on The Soft Bulletin, the track “Sleeping On The Roof.” But, and it say it again, we were going into the unknown. We did not envision The Soft Bulletin during this phase.

I will condense the story here because to go from “The Parking Lot Experiments” to Zaireeka is, in itself, a whole other complicated tale that will be explained when Zaireeka is made to DVD.

We began Zaireeka as a purely experimental recording and thought of it as being a purely experimental release. I guess what I mean is… It was, and still is, intended to be listened to by other artists, musicians and producers. We never expected the less involved members of our audience to care about it… So anyway, it gave us a kind of freedom. Freedom, I guess, not to be a rock band… or, I guess, maybe it let us be two different kinds of rock bands at the same time… ??

You see (and I’ve said it before) the more experimental we got, the more normal we became at the same time. We would be working on a freakish piece of Zaireeka like “Riding to Work in the Year2025,” with all of its channels of different instruments and rhythms, and, after a couple of days of recording and mixing we would, by contrast, want to do something simpler and more emotional. And though I believe we tried, initially, to make “Race for the Prize” work on Zaireeka (we were never satisfied), it would always, to us, work best with a more minimal sound field. So we began to have songs that were not going to work on Zaireeka but… we felt, were great “normal” songs. We began to think we could be an experimental recording group on one record and a symphonic rock band on another…??

“Race for the Prize” has now become, I believe, the signature song for what is thought of as the sound and philosophy of The Soft Bulletin. But in actuality, it was another song, “The Captain” (released here officially for the first time) that showed us how to be honest, epic and even bombastic, but still be human, humble and, I hope, graceful…

HERE DEAR READER is where my opening rant about NOT being schizophrenic or egomaniacal could seem… well… misguided. And I apologize if I sound like a drooling mad fool… But to speak of how a person has an internal idea and turns it into an external thing… it’s… well… it’s an unspeakable mechanism. The clichéd path that is believed to be what an artist takes is mostly not true. The path is this: an artist gets an idea and through sheer will and determination he creates what is in his head until, eventually, what was once “just in his head” becomes a painting, a movie, a song, a novel… a thing-a real touchable seeable thing. It appears to go from the inside out… but this is not really what happens… You see our brings work from the outside-in. You experience something through your eyes, your nose, your ears and your fingers. Sensations go into your brain and your brain gives them some meaning. And this “meaning” affects how you feel about what you’ve experienced… And artists, because they are sensitive to stimulations, want to create something that expresses this internal fusion of the experience, which came from the outside, and the meaning and feeling from within them… Right?? But again… they, the artists, create It to experience It. It is a constant flow of “experience” igniting “meaning” igniting “expression”… So it is hard to say when it is an idea and when it is a question… OK… Here’s the gist… An artist sits down to paint… he wants to paint… something… he feels a certain way. He globs some red paint onto the canvas… He is sensitive to stimulation so the red he has put on the canvas ignites meaning in his head and he expresses this meaning with a glob of yellow… before he knows it-he has painted a volcano erupting in a naked woman’s ear… So to say that he intended to paint the woman and the lava… well… it’s both yes and no… ?? But, regardless, it is now a thing… and within this thing he expressed his internal demands.

So anyway… sorry… if you are still there, I will now get back to this song this “volcano erupting in a naked woman’s ear” of a song “The Captain”…

We had been challenged, and perhaps even defeated, at times during the process of making Zaireeka. But we had also expanded our skills, our patience and our perspective of what now could be possible. So we sat down, with some enthusiasm, to do this dramatic song, “The Captain,” in which, within the framework of the song the singer (the narrator of the story) arrives at a new consciousness… and, in essence, it is possibly our NEW self killing off our OLD self… (in the song the ship’s doctor realizes the captain is a cold hearted and egotistical fool… and instead of letting the crew die or be killed because of his, the captain’s, small-mindedness and self-importance… he, the ship’s doctor, decides to kill him). The majestic layers of distorted brass and timpani, at the end of the song, perfectly fitted and expressed this internal journey… A man goes inside himself ready to destroy and change whatever does not accommodate his new consciousness… A man reinventing himself from the outside-in… as, I think, we were struggling to do.

We did not know what we would find when we set off into the unknown. And I suppose we didn’t just go into an artistic or musical unknown. But perhaps, like this song, we journeyed inside ourselves… What would we find?? Maybe we would find that everything we considered valuable and authentic was really fake and meaningless… Yeah… well… And if that were true… we would have… well… we would have reported it. I think that is why we called it The Soft Bulletin… Because it was as if we were giving a news flash… We went inside ourselves. We did not know what we would find. We were stern existentialists but we were also optimistic believers. We wanted to know “is the human spirit real??” We demanded of ourselves the truth… the truth as we found it… the truth as we experienced it.

We discovered that life is horrible and brutal and meaningless… Yes… But we also discovered that life can be made to be wonderful and beautiful… Yes… OK… But is life more horrible than it is beautiful?? And I guess, in a sense, here is where you have to believe us… (but you can truly only know through your own participation)… Pain and suffering devastate even the most resilient of organisms. We cannot avoid it… it was a lie, perhaps the lie of inexperience, that we ever thought we could avoid it. You see, experience and knowledge will show us that life is a long, dark, indifferent road full of anxiety and despair. But experience and knowledge also show us that we can light up this dark road… we are not helpless to its control… but it is up to us. The lights are not there. We must make them and put them there… and as we light it up for ourselves we also light it up for everyone else. You’ll be surprised how any lights have been put up along the way. And maybe with “The Soft Bulletin” we emerged from the dark unknown carrying a string of lights… that can perhaps, light up one small corner of life’s road that was otherwise hopeless and dark… And when your time comes I hope you will do the same.

Wayne

2005