Ten Albums in Ten Days – Ten Albums That Changed My Life Day 9: A Perfect Circle – Thirteenth Step This is probably going to be the hardest entry for me to write, but it’s something I think I need to say. Let me preface this by saying that I don’t like A Perfect Circle and I don’t like this album. But this list is “Albums that Changed My Life”, not “Albums that I love”, and if there’s any album that goes with a very specific certain period in my life, it’s this one. I’m going to do things a bit backwards here, and talk about the music first, and then give the context. A Perfect Circle is a band featuring Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan and several other relatively famous (to certain crowds) musicians. It formed in 1999, released 3 albums in a 5 year period, and then mostly just disappeared as the constituent musicians went back to their primary projects. “Thirteenth Step” was the second album released by the band. Musically, the songs vary between electric-guitar driven rockers, with prominent drums, to melodic slower songs. Still, each song has that alt-rock/alt-metal feeling to it. It’s a very specific type of music. The lyrical theme of the album is all about addiction and all the things that come with it: lying, cheating, stealing, overdose, abuse, suicide, psychosis, and in the end, giving up. Now, let me stop you right there before you try and pin down how this relates to me: it doesn’t. I don’t identify with the lyrical material at all, and that’s not where this album fits with me. But for a period in my life, it did fit a lot of people I knew. Neighbors, friends, classmates. The chorus to the opening track, “The Package”, began the similarities: “Lie to get what I came for; Lie to get just what I need”. A song about doing whatever it takes, about putting on the face you want to see. “The Noose” speaks of suicide, although cloaked in poetry, “Blue” talks about ignoring what’s in front of you because it’s not something you can deal with (specifically, in the song’s context, an overdose). The album is meant, I think, to be a cautionary tale for those of us who don’t know what it’s like, and a refuge for those who are already there. Some people I knew, though, seemed to embrace it. To willingly admit, yes, I’ll lie to your face if it gets me what I want right now. Yes, I’ll do anything it takes. Yes, I feel like I’m already dead, so I’m just going to take these pills and drift away, hoping that for a few hours at least I don’t have to deal with reality, with bills piling up, with rent due and police knocking on the door and friends dying and no one seeming to care except the others that are in the same situation. It would be so much easier if I could just drift away into insanity. There is no help coming. I don’t like this album. I don’t like it at all. But the life it gives a glimpse of... that was the life of a lot of people I knew. Eventually, I married my wife and got the heck outta Dodge. Ended up in California for a year, and when I came back, I didn’t reconnected with almost any of my former neighbors / friends. Some of them got better, some got worse. Some escaped, some never did, and some will never get the chance either way. RECOMMENDED LISTENING: The Package: https://youtube/watch?v=cqJJwv_Caaw Blue: https://youtube/watch?v=zlysZAUNyFg The Outsider: https://youtube/watch?v=nzyNWyZhUS0 Pet: https://youtube/watch?v=lrEP3RPgEao Gravity: https://youtube/watch?v=_cDdMZ2K9o0 The Nurse Who Loved Me: https://youtube/watch?v=CWRDZwV8jGE (Note: Walking into a dark room to see 6-8 people all sitting in a circle holding hands singing this was one of the most jarring and frankly truly unnerving things I’ve ever had happen to me.)
Posted on: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 21:02:14 +0000
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