Day 14: "Purple" - Stone Temple Pilots (1994)

Now we reach the first album in The Pile that I know I've owned multiple times, which probably says something about how much I like it, and how careless I am with my own possessions, even if I'm strongly into them.

Listen to me here

First things first, look at that.  I willingly paid £16 for a CD, and this was probably the third time I had bought this particular album.  When you contrast that against the cost of Spotify Premium, which costs half as much per month for me to listen to basically every album I own plus a whole bunch that I don't, it's little wonder that brick & mortar music retailers have gone the way of the dinosaur - at least until the Streaming Service bubble collapses and our Mad Max future consists of bartering exclusively in physical media.  When the era of Blockbuster and HMV rises again, we're all going to pay the price.

This is definitely an album that I owned originally on cassette as, in my mind, there is still a pause between "Pretty Penny" and "Superman Silvergun"where I have to turn the cassette over.  Like a lot of music I was buying in the early 90's, cassette was my preferred medium, because every portable music playing method I had (specifically my beat up Morris Mini and my Sony Walkman) only took cassette.  In fact, as I am writing this, I have a fairly strong hunch that my original version of this album was amongst the bag of tapes that was stolen from my Mini, along with the tape player itself, after I left my car in a fairly prominent car park at like 6pm in the evening because a girl I had a crush on was upset and wanted to talk to me in a pub nearby.  I went, talked to her, went back to my car and found a broken window, a missing tape deck, and all my tapes gone with it.  Truly no let's-say-good-but-in-reality-slightly-morally-dubious deed goes unpunished.

Now, I don't want to talk to much about why I like the band, because I know their first album "Core" is coming up and that's a far better venue for that story.  Instead, I'm going to talk about singing.

I wish I was more musical than I am.  My family certainly has a musical streak, and there are certain parts of that which have rubbed off on me in slightly obtuse ways.  I've pretty good at learning lyrics, for example.  I can usually memorise a song after 3 or 4 passes, especially if I have a lyric book available to help me avoid any mondegreens, and once a song is memorised, the lyrics just lurk in my brain so I can find myself subconsciously singing along to songs I haven't thought about or heard in years.  I dabble in guitar, having decided a couple of years ago that I should dedicate myself to at least learning some kind of musical instrument.  I'm still terrible at it, and even worse if I think anyone can see or hear me playing, but I'm less terrible than I was two years ago.

But what I've really always wanted to do was sing better.  I can do OK, some days, with some songs, if I know them well, and they're pitched in my range.  I'm musically savvy enough to be able to change the key of a song, or drop it an octave to try and keep it roughly where I can sing all the notes. And I've got little enough regard for my own levels of embarrassment that I'm happy to Karaoke or Rock Band in front of people without getting self conscious about it.

The time I spent in my formative adolescent years listening to some of the voices fronting bands that I loved made me wish I could sing like them.  Chris Cornell from Soundgarden (may he rest in peace), Mike Patton from Faith No More;  Michael Stipe, James Taylor, and Josh Homme, these were all my vocal heroes.  But if I could pick anyone, I'd probably want to sing like Scott Weiland from Stone Temple Pilots (may he also rest in peace).

Now, Scott Weiland is about as divisive a figure as the grunge scene in the 90's and 2000's had.  He was approximately 65% heroin by body weight for the majority of his career, and the spaces between the albums he voiced, either for Stone Temple Pilots, Velvet Revolver, or his own touring band, were pretty good indications of the times he was in and out of rehab.  But boy howdy can he sing a tune.  He's got an amazing range, both melodically and emotionally, which meant that he could change styles from album to album effortlessly.  

"Purple" is almost certainly the best STP album of their discography.  It's a much more mature sound than their debut, and with the exception of the opening track, which is just alright, I think nearly every song on here has single potential (and in fact, 5 of the 12 tracks on the album would be released as singles in the US).  Listening to it again was effortless, as I absolutely know every track off here like the back of my hand, and it was nice to have an excuse to go back to it again.

So if you're looking for a great, if of-its-era rock record, or you are working on the technology to allow the android version of me to sing better, this is the place to go.