From The CD Shelf: 3 Doors Down - The Better Life

The dominance of pop/rock radio for 3 Doors Down started with their '99 release "The Better Life". This came right about the time I really started to get into music, 1999 being my sophomore year in high school.

As I listen to the opening track "Kryptonite", I'm swept back to Hampden, Maine in my poster plastered room with the tune pumping out of my now defunct Sony boombox. Almost everyone that listened to the radio in that year and the many years after couldn't help but know that infectious tune that was just so easy to sing along with and always left you wanting to hear it again. (For me anyway.)

From start to finish, this album spun in my old Sony over and over and truly jump started my love affair with alternative rock. It might have also been my first real clue into how much I liked to sing. Brad Arnold's vocals always fit my vocal range brilliantly and as testament to that, track 5 on the album, "Be Like That" was one of the first songs I learned on guitar and sang along with.

It was 2001, in the last months of my senior year that I got to see 3 Doors Down live. I use the term "see" very loosely. The band played at the annual music festival called Bumstock at the nearby University of Maine (a festival that my band was a part of 3 years later) but since my girlfriend and I weren't 18 yet, we weren't allowed inside the gate.

So people like us couldn't get a free show, multiple truck trailers were lined up to block the view of the gigantic stage. The great thing about rock 'n roll is that is takes much more than a couple of trailers to drown it out. We curled up in a blanket, leaned against a tree in a grassy area outside Somerset Hall and listened.

Many years after I finally got a chance to "see" 3 Doors Down in Portland as they toured to promote their 3rd studio album. The show exceeded my expectations by far with the intense light show, the pyrotechnics, the slamming base and the outstanding stage presence of Brad. When they blasted out "Kryptonite" it took me back for a couple of seconds to where I am right now as I listen to the "The Better Life" here at my computer.

Who knows where my music tastes would be today if it weren't for this album. Who knows if I would have developed the passion for music and singing that I have today and can't live without. One thing is for sure, I need to whip this album out a little bit more often.

From The CD Shelf, Our Lady Peace - Spiritual Machines

I like so many things about listening to music. Aside from the sheer joy of listening to tunes I love, I revel in the feeling that a track or a whole album envelopes me in. Especially a tune or album that I haven't heard in quite a while. It really is a great feeling to queue up a song that takes you back to when you first heard the song, or maybe even the point in time you had that album constantly spinning.

So I decided to venture down the stairs to the living room and peruse my cd collection to see what tickled my fancy. My collection is getting quite large, stalled lately with my lack of a job, but there are many albums that haven't seen the inside of cd player for quite a while. My eye caught on "Spiritual Machines" by Our Lady Peace, as I've mentioned before, my favorite band. It was easy for my eye to catch on this one because OLP has their own little section that is separate from the rest of the alphabetized masterpiece that is my collection.

I wanted to get this one spinning more than any other album on my shelf because this album imparticular transports me back in time more than any other. Released in 2000, "Spiritual Machines" came out when I was a senior in high school. This is when I had finally started driving and I really started to develop my passion for music.

The album itself is a concept album based around the book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurzweil. Between many of the tracks Ray quotes experts from his book. I don't think a lot of people really got the point, but really, I didn't need to, the music and everything with it just spoke to me. As I listen right now, the intro that leads into the song "Right Behind You (Mafia)" transports me directly behind the wheel of my mother's 1990 Pontiac 6000LE on one of my autopilot drives back home from school.

(You know what I mean about driving on autopilot, right? It's when you start driving and then basically blank out for a certain amount of time only to realize you're almost home and you don't remember a thing from the last couple of miles. I think that was what a combo of OLP and crappy high school did to me.)

The funniest part was that I couldn't even spin the album in my inherited car because it didn't even have a cd player, just an in-dash cassette player. I did the common thing back then to make my music portable; record my cd over to a cassette tape. I made many a blueberry raking mix for my Sony Walkman this way but this tape was strictly for OLP and my drives to and from school.

I was obsessed with the album that whole year. Out of their 6 studio albums to date, it was their least commercially successful album but it didn't matter to me. In fact, anyone who didn't like the album can bite me. From the first single "In Repair" to "Life", "Middle Of Yesterday", "Made To Heal", and "Everyone's A Junkie" (big green monkey everyone's a junkie), I was hooked. Of course, I'm biased, so I can't blame the critics, I guess. (Bite my tongue.)

I'm sure I was caught in my singing bubble more than once by passing drivers like I mentioned in my post "Cutting Back Costs In Hard Times By...Not Singing". But hey, if I looked like an idiot, I didn't care. This album was truly my age 17 anthem and it will always be remembered for that.

On top of all this, the summer of 2001, a couple of weeks before I graduated from high school I got to see OLP live in concert for the first time (I rummaged out the ticket and it's pictured on the right). This further cemented this album as a turning point in my musical maturation.

(I've seen OLP once more since then and can't wait for their new album "Burn Burn" to drop so I can hopefully see them again. Come to Kansas City OLP!)

As you can tell, there are a lot of memories associated with "Spiritual Machines" and close to every album on my shelf does the same thing. I'm sure to some extent there are tunes out there that do the same thing to you too. Feel free to comment with some songs that take you back in time.

I feel like I'm talking as if I'm much older than 25 and reminiscing about days long gone, maybe I've even over dramatizing it, but I won't be when I stick this album in 30 years from now and remember this all over again.

I just had to include the video for "In Repair" below. It really encompasses the whole concept of the album. Enjoy.