Nostalgia? Nah, life appreciation.

I find myself jamming to some older music lately, and it puts me in a certain mindset. Today I’m listening to Stone Temple Pilots “purple” in its entirety.

This was released when I first arrived at Fort Bragg in 1994, and it was the soundtrack to the first few years I spent in the Army. I was already married to Samantha by then, so this doesn’t hold any memories of love lost, young flings, or anything like that. Those are usually the strong emotions that drive nostalgic feelings, at least for me. Just now “Flies in the Vaseline” kicked on and I was suddenly buoyed and feeling energetic. You could make a solid argument that this was exactly the response the music should elicit. It’s simple, hard hammering guitars, and booming drums, are obvious, but I think it’s more than that because when I was listening to this in my CD player or more often on a cassette, I was 22 and at the peak of my life, I did everything full bore. So when it came on, it brought at these powerful memories of excitement, happiness, energy spent doing the things young warriors have done for literal centuries.

One of the things I’ve been enjoying lately is listening to albums all the way through. Streaming music has led us to stops and start listening, like listening to the radio all the time rather than popping in a CD and hearing what the artists were saying overall. A lot of music is written with that in mind, the idea that each song is a single, standing on its own merits (or usually lack of them). I’ve always enjoyed the full bore theme albums a lot of less well-known bands release, Coheed and Cambria come immediately to mind with almost all their work, but specifically to my taste, “The Afterman”. Any single song on it would make little sense without the others. You need to listen to it from start to finish, not on shuffle. But that’s not the only way full listening has appealed to me, its also the little gems that disappear into recordings when they don’t make it as a single. Literally, EVERYONE knows “Interstate Love Song” from “Purple” and that song carries more memories for me than almost anything released in the 90s, but there are some others, “Still Remains” is fantastic and very much like a combination of 70s rock and “Foo Fighters” boom.

Pick a song and sing a yellow nectarine

Take a bath, I’ll drink the water that you leave

If you should die before me

Ask if you can bring a friend

Pick a flower, hold your breath

And drift away

She holds my hand, we share a laugh

Slipping orange blossom breezes

Love is still and sweat remains

A cherished gift, unselfish feeling

The story is that Scott Weiland wrote the song for Janina Castaneda, his first wife, and there is a constant thread through STP music for her, with “Sour Girl” and “Interstate Love Song” also written for or about her. By now everyone knows Weiland was a heroin addict of the highest level, it ultimately having taken his life. The unfortunate reality is that it probably also led to some of his (and the era in general’s) finest writing. The despair brought on by destroying your own life, and that of someone he loved let to some breathtakingly raw and open writing, and despite STP getting billed as the “Commercial answer to Nirvana” by a lot of self-important critics of the time, I’d say that after “Core” they did just fine. You should listen to “Purple” all the way through, from start to finish, and take in the lives, and emotions that wind their way through it.