New music comes and goes, but it’s the stuff you listened to as a teenager that stays with you, right?
I’m a hell of a lot closer to 40 than 20 these days and I’ve noticed my Spotify leanings have been swaying back towards Creed’s Human Clay (1999), Korn’s Follow The Leader (1998), Slipknot’s self-titled debut, and a bunch of other releases from the late nineties.
Someone introduced me to the band by way of their 1997 debut album My Own Prison, which was about junior cert territory.
Human Clay, however, seemed to explode. 12 tracks, just over an hour from start to finish, far from radio-friendly despite the relative commercial success of the album and while it sounded good back then, for some reason it’s been sounding phenomenal of late.
Sure, Weathered (2001) was a decent album too – and the band’s last before their 2004 split – but there was no case of second album syndrome with this one. Maybe it’s easier to reflect (and admit) on over 20 years after I first picked up a CD copy of the album, but track for track, it’s a cracker.
There may be a fuzzy nostalgic undercurrent running throughout the entire play, from the edgy opener in Are You Ready? to the six-minute-long Faceless Man at the half-way point, through Higher in all its anthemic glory before Inside Us All winds things down nicely.
Depending on what version you’re listening to, you might get that second running of With Arms Wide Open with added strings.
There may have only been a handful of copies sold in Kilkenny back in 1999 but the album wound up topping the US Billboard 200 and shifted over 11 million units Stateside alone and over 20 million copies worldwide. 2019 also saw a special double-LP release
There’s obviously someone listening to them still with the likes of My Sacrifice, One Last Breath, Higher and With Arms Wide Open boasting over a half-billion streams on Spotify alone.
If you bump into me late at night walking two dogs while I’ve got headphones on, know that this is my current jam.
Creed albums on Spotify: My Own Prison, Human Clay, Weathered, Greatest Hits, With Arms Wide Open: A Retrospective
