With Ears Wide Open: Listening to Every Creed Song Front to Back

So how about this Scott Stapp guy, right? What a crazy dude he is!

Okay, Scott Stapp hasn't been in the news for a while now. Stapp and his band Creed have become a joke, a point of reference when discussing how awful some mid-late 90s rock was. If Nickelback weren't still relevant and popular, Creed would surely still be everyone's go-to punchline band.

A few of my friends have crafted a list of songs they want Stapp to do covers of, with the ultimate goal to mail them to Stapp and convince him to come out with a cover album entitled "Stapp Infection." The list includes everything from "Your Song" by Elton John to most anything in Sarah McClachlan's discography. When I go out to karaoke night at the bar or play a gig, they ask what/how many Creed songs I'll be singing this time. These jokes never, ever get old. Really. Whether that's a testament to how funny Creed is or how immature we are is something I'm not particularly interested in investigating.

I have no clue how I originally thought to listen to every Creed and Scott Stapp song front to back, but I think it started when I went to the Exchange in Pittsburgh and bought a slew of $1 CDs, including two Creed CDs and Scott Stapp's solo album. Originally, I grabbed them because, you know, wouldn't it be, like, totally hilarious and ironic if I actually bought a Creed CD, guys?

Since I had more than half their music, though, the possibility became very real. So with a ton of housework and errands to do on Monday, I decided I'd be accompanied by the dulcet tones of the Stapp Squad. Front to back. Every Creed song, and all of Stapp's solo album, in one afternoon. (I am leaving out music from Alter Bridge, the band everyone in Creed except for Stapp formed when they broke up, for reasons that I'll explain later)

I decided to do this alone. This was a risky choice, because while I'd be sparing my roommates and friends from the trial that was to follow, I'd also have no one around if I eventually had an aneurysm or collapsed from sheer exhaustion. Still, this was my struggle and I would not impart it on any others.

To keep record of my task, I decided to keep a running diary, Bill Simmons style. And away we go...

11:35 AM – “Come on men! Nobody lives forever!”

11:40 – I forgot that Scott Stapp was basically trying to be Eddie Vedder back in the day. The long notes he holds on “Torn” tipped me off to this immediately, and now I’m going to notice it all day. This would be cool if I were a bigger fan of Pearl Jam. Also, nothing like opening your CD with a song that works at a slower pace than most 80s power ballads.

11:48 – I do a couple quick calculations and determine that the average Creed song is just about 4 minutes, 30 seconds long, which is bizarre because I’ve yet to find a Creed song less than 27 minutes in length.

11:51 – Curveball here on “My Own Prison,” where Stapp describes the scene in a courtroom, and eventually, a cage, except for the twist is, the person on trial is him, and he hasn’t committed a crime, per se, but he’s on trial for his sins in front of God or his mom or Steve Wilkos or whoever does these kind of things. Time to start drinking.

12:00 – Mark Tremonti is in that Wes Boreland class of pop musician who’s stuck in a shitty band, but gets individual praise for being one of the not-as-shitty parts of it. Critics begrudgingly gave praise to Boreland despite agreeing to be in Limp Bizkit and for wearing this all the time. Likewise, Tremonti got credit for putting fair-to-middling riffs alongside Stapp and the mind-numbing rhythm section.

I bring this up because I just heard a decent guitar solo on “Pity For a Dime” and I’m pretty sure Stapp was like “Well, that’s just about enough of that bullshit” and banned it from happening again after this CD came out. Now Tremonti solos like a madman in Alter Bridge, which is basically Creed with a better lead singer who also happens to be on the opposite spectrum of Stapp religiously. Alter Bridge also happens to be ten times better than Creed. Go figure

12:30 – Just took a 15-minute break to watch Donovan McNabb’s retirement speech, which was phenomenal. Back to the real action, though.

12:46 – “One” is the most Pearl Jam-y song on here, mixed with a healthy dose of angst that made Papa Roach go “Yeah! That’s what we’re going for! That!”

12:55 – Okay, let me level with you for a second. “What If,” from the bazillion-time platinum album "Human Clay," was the first Creed song I heard that wasn’t “Higher” or “With Arms Wide Open,” and I still kind of like it in that “I could see a pro wrestler using this as their entrance music” way.

1:10 – We’re now at “Wrong Way,” where the band loosens up with some dub-inspired upstroke guitars and horns, bongos, and a general lighter feel that truly…ahhhhhhh, just kidding, it’s another slow, grinding “grunge” rocker! Wooooooo! I can’t feel my toes anymore.

1:21 – There is no difference in the last five songs I’ve listened to. At least I think it was five. I’m starting to lose grasp of the concept of numbers. I just shouted “STAPP!” loudly in my empty house to remind myself I have a mouth.

1:22 – WELL I JUST HEARD

THE NEWS TODAY

SEEMS MY LIFE

IS GONNA CHANGE

I CLOSE MY EYES
BEGIN TO PRAY

THEN TEARS OF JOY

STREAM DOWN MY FACE

MY WIFE BOUGHT JAMESON

AT THE LIQUOR STORE

WELCOME TO MY FRIDGE

NOW LET’S DRINK ALL OF IT

MY WIFE BOUGHT JAMESON…

1:25 – Apparently, the kid Stapp had who inspired “With Arms Wide Open” is named Jagger. Carry on.

1:28 – CAN YOU TAKE ME HIGHER

TO A PLACE WHERE I HAVE WEED

CAN YOU TAKE ME HIGHER

TO A PLACE WITH HENNESSEY

1:35 – I’m going to start playing the “Guess The Next Line” game now to see if I can figure out what Stapp’s going to rhyme. “Tears” rhymes with “years,” by the way, in case you were interested in writing a song where you’re shedding tears over all those years, or if you’re looking back on all those years and thinking back on all those tears, or if you’re….

1:39 – Another change-up on “Inside Us All,” as Scott decides to write a song about how it feels to be alone. Powerful.

1:44 – A song started fading out with 51 seconds left, leaving 17 seconds left on the track when it finally went silent. Unrelated: I’ve started pretending to be Scott Stapp at home talking to his wife in the same voice he sings in to entertain myself.

1:45 – My iTunes track list says a song called “Young Grow Old” is the last song on “Human Clay,” but – SUCKER – it’s a redone version of “With Arms Wide Open” with more orchestration, more Stapp harmonies, and more vodka for me.

1:51 – Alright, so "Bullets" is a decent song too. Whatever.

1:55 – Some bizarre chant opens up the next song on the docket. I switch back to iTunes to see it’s a song entitled “Who’s Got My Back?” Simultaneously, I notice the song is eight and a half minutes long. I begin to cry.

2:05 – “Signs” is an awful song. Downright terrible, pontificating dirge. I wrote that down and made a note to come back to it later to include a joke. I still don’t have one.

2:07 – As I continue my extensive Creed research, I find there were a lot of publications who considered them a metal band, which I guess is true in the sense that they’re not a barbershop quartet, or a NASCAR pit crew, or a box of oranges, and they're definitely more similar to a metal band than they are those other things.

2:10 – HOLD ME

I’M SIX FEET FROM THE EDGE AND I’M DRINKING

MY NAME IS SCOTT STAPP

AND I DRINK A WHOLE LOT

THIS JOKE’S PRETTY FUCKED OUT AT THIS POINT

2:34 – I think I’m in a coma.

2:38 – Dangerous times in the household as Scott Stapp’s solo CD comes on. I feel like I’m supposed to give some advance notice to the neighborhood, or get a license to do this or something.

2:43 – The second song on Stapp’s solo CD is called “Fight Song.” I definitely want to fight someone right now. Or strangle a parakeet.

2:51 – If I told 16 year old Matt that I’d be spending a Monday afternoon at age 24 listening to a Scott Stapp song with a spoken word bridge, he probably would have said “This creep says he’s me from the future! Police! Get that psycho!”

3:05 – Okay, I recognize “The Great Divide.” I watched the music video in high school on VH1 or something. I’m pretty sure he was in some arena where the roof opens up and he looks at the sky a lot. I refuse to look it up to confirm this.

3:08 – My roommate Ki just walked on me sitting shirtless in a leather chair in our living room alone with the blinds drawn listening to Scott Stapp, and long story short, I’m homeless now.

3:15 – The song “You Will Soar” just came on, which means it’s FINALLY the time to remind you that this exists.

3:17 – And this.

3:18 – Stapp “Why are we overcome with fear? What if I told you fear wasn’t real?”
            Ki – “That’s fuckin’ heavy.” (continues eating soup)

3:20 – There’s a full gospel choir, piano and orchestral arrangement on the last song of Stapp’s solo CD, which is fine, except for it just reinforces the fact that Stapp would be the worst Baptist church worship leader ever.

3:21 – So now we move to Creed’s latest CD – they reunited in 2009, if you didn’t know. And now I get why everyone gives Mark Tremonti all that credit for his guitar playing and songwriting, because the first song is infinitely better than anything on Stapp’s solo CD, during which I nearly fell asleep four times. “Overcome” sounds a lot more like Alter Bridge, and therefore, like an actual rock song, as opposed to something stuck in “Creed World.” (Similar to how the Red Hot Chili Peppers have been stuck writing songs in PeppersWorld for nearly ten years, except worse)

3:28 – Seriously, this is actually not terrible.

3:42 – Aaaaaaaaand I’m bored again.

4:37 – Okay, so I went out to the store for a bit and listened to almost all of the second half of “Full Circle.” It’s definitely better than the prior four CDs, which means that I was able to ignore big chunks of it as opposed to actively noticing how bad it was. The major difference is the band is actually writing rock music as opposed to writing “Creed” music, which means that, even though it’s still pretty dull and gray, at least it’s not the same shade of dull and gray every….single….song.

I’m now up to the final track, “The Song You Sing.” Four minutes. I can do this on my own, guys.

4:38 – *unscrews cap on bottle of Woodford Reserve, pours*

4:41 - *deep breath* Okay. We did it. All four hours and 12 minutes of Scott Stapp-related music has received a spin today. I thought I wasn’t going to make it once Stapp dropped the “What is wrong with the world today?” question we’ve heard eleventy billion times in rock music, 95 percent of which have come from Creed songs.

But I pressed on. Because much like the man Stapp claims to keep at the center of his world, I sacrificed myself and did this all so that you never have to.

Women, Amiright?, or How I Learned to Embrace Online Dating, Then Promptly Stop Embracing It

Breaking news coming out of the “WABWW” situation room: Dating is kinda bullshit sometimes.

Lost amidst all the life/body changes and the social class warfare and the awk-warrrrrd-ness and the, you know, education of high school and college is the fact that, as a young person interested in meeting someone else of a corresponding sexual preference, you’re surrounded by prospects every single day. Furthermore, with so many different classes, activities and situations in which to meet your peers, there’s a new cast of characters every day to interact with. And there is literally something going on every weekend (Dances/mixers! Plays! Football games! Al-Queda meetings!) designed exclusively for you to meet new people, or to ask someone to go with you.

Unfortunately, you also have all the social savvy of a drunken hyena, which often derails the looooooove train before the train even comes to the first bend in the tracks– or, for the more tentative among us, keeps us from even trying to leave the station. Meeting girls/guys, asking them out/getting them to ask you out, and maintaining any semblance of a long term relationship is tricky enough when you’re not going through all those ch-ch-changes. (Also, not having a car kinda sucks, too, so protip: get a hold of one of those)

Combine the interpersonal inexperience with the abundance of opportunities, and dating in your educational years is like fishing on Lake Michigan with a pole made of taped-up twigs and sewing thread. And by the time you graduate college and hit the working world with your shiny, new “Pike Pick ‘Em 5000” and your fancy new motorboat, all the fish are gone.

Well, they’re not gone, just much harder to track down. Now you’ve got a job (hopefully) and bills to pay. (Technically, your studies were supposed to be your full-time job before but…I mean…come on)

Now you’re not meeting fresh-faced, similarly-aged folks every day, but a variety of grizzled, grumpy co-workers from all over the age map with at least one kid and at least one spouse, whose only interest is putting their head down and grinding through each work day while engaging in more verbal interaction with the dollar-store bamboo plant on their desk than with any other living thing within a 20-foot radius.

How are you to meet new friends now, let alone someone of the opposite sex (or same sex – hey, we live in a progressive society, man) whom you’d like to take out on the town sometime? You could just stay/reunite with your college/high school sweetheart, but you two could have become very different people in the last few years. (Also there is usually the pre-requisite of having one first – no guarantees)

You could meet someone at the bar or the club, but bars are best for hanging with a couple buddies and catching up/watching the game, and clubs are usually too loud to actually interact with people anyway. (But hey, if “no verbal communication” is a huge factor in who you’re looking for, by all means)

You could ask someone out from work, but dipping the pen in company ink is a minefield. What if it doesn’t work out and you have to see the person every day afterwards? What if someone at the office finds out and it creates a conflict of interest? What if you work at a sewage facility? What if you're a priest?

Then, there’s that last bastion of blind dating bliss – online dating.

My friend and I met a couple in Baltimore last summer who’d met on OKCupid, a popular and supposedly effective free dating site, six months prior and swore by it. Albeit with an extremely small sample size, meeting people online has at least proven to be somewhat successful. It’s become a popular enough option that dozens of niche dating sites pop up every day: Farmers Only, Christian Mingle, Black People Meet, IJuggleChainsawsForALivingAndIHopeYouDoToo.com, etc.

For better or worse, social media is society’s new method of communication and keeping in touch, so while you’re “liking” every status with a Justin Timberlake reference in it or sharing the overused meme du jour, why not try to meet someone who ALSO likes Justin Timberlake and sharing overused memes?

So a couple months ago, my roommate and I made an OKCupid profile for another friend of ours (because we’re dicks) and, after seeing what it entailed (bragging about yourself and hoping someone bites), I gave it a shot for myself.

It’s a bizarre environment. Logging on, you are bombarded with pictures and percentages – generally, how strongly the site believes you and the person in the photo next to those numbers are connected. Profiles are generally variations of “I like to have fun! With my friends!” and “Don’t message me unless you have something interesting to say…or if you like to try new things, like I do!” You answer questions to improve your compatibility scores, which range from “Would you prefer good things happen to you, or interesting things?” to “Can you count to four?” You also get to see the last time someone logged in, which means other people are well aware that you’re logging on at 2 AM on a weekend after getting drunk and watching Meatspin for two hours.

The end result of all this: a few messages to total strangers, and little else. (Also, my ex from high school found me on it, which was....yeah)

Maybe online dating just isn’t for me. Maybe I’m just not looking for something like that right now. Naturally, though, the real answer was that I wasn’t being superficial enough.

A friend of mine told me about Tinder, a mobile app that connects to your Facebook profile, picks up on your likes and interests, then presents you with  photos of other Facebook users (not your friends, mind you, but total strangers who happen to live near you – so you do need to give it your location as well). Beneath the pictures are three buttons – a “yes” and “no” button, and an “info” button for people who actually want to go beyond the picture and see what one or two things the person enjoys. If you click no, it casts that person away, never to grace your screen again. If you click yes, it saves your answer and then connects you to that person if they find you as attractive as you find them (which is also determined through the yes-no thing above)

On the one hand, pretending physical beauty is not a major part of dating is pious nonsense. Attractiveness is almost always the first thing you notice about someone. You don’t have time to find out whether someone else likes slasher films or poetry or football, or knows how to fix cars, or how healthy their soul is, before your eyes/brain have determined whether or not they can fixate on that mug of theirs for longer than five seconds without pounding the “ABORT MISSION” button and averting your gaze elsewhere.

On the other hand, Tinder takes all the fun out of acting like a pompous asshole because it’s exactly what “The Facebook” used to be, or what “Hot or Not” was like for those of us with little to no interest in paying attention during computer class at school. If someone’s hitting you up on Tinder, it’s strictly off the basis of your looks (or, the looks of your model friend who also happens to be in your profile picture, which you’ve done just to confuse people).

It also fuels your desire for acceptance and drives you insane if you don’t get it. Why haven’t I gotten a message yet? Doesn’t anyone else find my picture studly and beautiful?  What’s wrong with me? I HATE THIS SHIT.

Even though there's nothing inherently bad about meeting people this way, it's obviously not for everyone, myself included. While the whole point is to find someone you're compatible during the few hours you're not working/eating/sleeping/watching "My Little Pony," something about using algorithms to find my "soul mate," or even a date for a random Friday night, seems weird to me.

It's cliche, but I do consider myself old-fashioned in this category. I like meeting people organically, getting to know them organically, finding out if I'd like to hang out with them more organically. It's more exciting and fun than booting up my laptop for five minutes a night and seeing who Deep Thought has rounded up for me.

So I think I’m done with online dating, at least as a serious option. It’s fun, but it’s basically just Twitter/Facebook with an extra dose of inadequacy. From now on, I’m back to just straight chillin’, homes, letting things just happen, meeting friends – and meeting women – the old fashioned way: by going back to what worked for me in school.

Why Losing Your Mind Over the Rolling Stone Cover is Total Horseshit

That's all.

One other thing: Enough complaining about how the cover makes him look like a rock star. The whole point of the Rolling Stone article is to document the progression of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from young Chechen immigrant to terroristic madman. This means looking at him like a human being without actually empathizing with him. For weeks after the bombing, many of us (myself included) were bombarded with details of the plot itself, all the while wondering, "Why? Why did they do it?" The article attempts to answer that. Hence, after months of pictures like this (and yes, I know these specific images came out today, but you know what I mean), we get one where he looks like a normal person.

WIth that said, Rolling Stone is still garbage. Carry on.

Kids Playing Sports! Everyone Look!

I read a lot like I drive: I’ll start at a nice, safe pace, paying attention to little details and retaining all the information being thrown at me*. Then, about ten minutes in, I’ll start going faster and faster, my brain will stop sucking up the info, my eyes will glaze over, and before you know it, there I am flying off the Ben Franklin Bridge with three missing wheels and at least four dead pedestrians in the backseat after flying through my windshield. (I’m a dangerous reader)

*-I also used to speed read before an exam in college much like I speed to work now when I’m late: I crank some Queens of the Stone Age, drink about 15 Dr. Peppers, blaze ahead with no regard for human life… and before you know it, there I am flying off the Ben Franklin Bridge with three missing wheels and at least four dead pedestrians in the backseat after flying through my windshield.

Point is, my reading patterns are sporadic; it can take me five minutes to bang out “Fountainhead” or five weeks to get through the foreword of “Everybody Poops.” (I’m assuming it has a foreword – otherwise, I feel really dumb about how my college thesis went)

So while I haven’t forgotten about this (we’ll get back to that sooner than you think), I’ve also been catching up on a backlog of magazines I’ve received over the last few months. You know, the intelligent stuff. This includes ESPN The Magazine, which I’ve been receiving intentionally or otherwise for about six years. For the most part, ESPN the Mag specializes in theme issues nowadays. The Money Issue. The Athletes Take Over Issue. The Check Out These Nekkid Pix Issue.

This past month, we got to the “Kids in Sports” issue.  Adorning its cover is Dylan Moses, a 6’1”, 215-pound running back from Baton Rouge, La. who’s been sitting on scholarship offers from LSU and seven other schools for a little over a year. He starts his day at 4:30 AM with 400 pushups, 800 sit-ups, 10 minutes of jump rope and a mile run.

Dylan is 15. He received his first offer in 8^th grade.

In 8^th grade, my biggest decision was whether to spend my Saturday afternoons playing basketball or video games, and I was pretty bad at picking between that. By my senior year of high school, I was barely able to pick what college I wanted to attend with my family asking me about it daily, let alone dozens of journalists and several rabid fan bases.

The article cites a handful of other examples of barely-teens being asked to make decisions most high school seniors dread – where to go to college, who to trust their career training with – because they happen to run like gazelles and throw footballs across different area codes.

This has not-so-secretly been happening for years. ESPN has made signing day, the day most top high school recruits choose which college campus they’ll be gracing their presence with, a nationally televised event. T.J. McConnell, former point guard for my alma mater Duquesne, signed with the Dukes two full years before graduating high school. He’s now at the University of Arizona, transferring after his sophomore year.

This really started with LeBron James, though. There were plenty of high school basketball players who chose to forgo college and enter the NBA Draft before the league began to require players be one year removed from high school before declaring. Some, like Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant, became superstars, while others, like Kwame Brown and Darius Miles…didn’t.

But none of them received the attention LeBron did. Many writers wondered if he shouldn’t be allowed to declare for the draft after his junior year of high school. James agreed, petitioning the league to allow him into the 2002 draft despite having not finished high school.

Instead, LeBron was forced to wait until the 2003 draft, when he was selected first overall by his hometown team, the Cleveland Cavaliers. Seven years later, LeBron left the Cavs for the Miami Heat in a nationally televised event known as “The Decision,” a 75-minute ESPN program exclusively devoted to announcing where LeBron would play the next year.

It’s amazing – simply amazing, I tell you – that a player who received nonstop media attention since before he could drive, who was referred to as “The King” before he was allowed to vote, who had his first slew of shoe deals and sponsorships before he could legally take his first sip of alcohol, managed to grow into an out-of-touch egomaniac.

LeBron has dealt with near constant international attention better than most physical prodigies. This is far from a scientific study, but is it at all possible that giving extremely young athletes an unbelievable amount of media attention could be bad? Could inflate their big heads, or cause them to collapse under pressure?

The easy response is to blame the media, blame ESPN, but there’s a reason they keep producing issues like this and covering signing day – we dig it. We marvel at it, and the media supply what we want. If we ever stopped watching, they'd stop broadcasting it. (This is why I also roll my eyes whenever people bitch about some of the garbage ESPN airs, or when a league has a lockout. Stop watching or buying the product if it pisses you off so much. Hit 'em in the wallet. Arrange an actual boycott)

Maybe I’m totally off base and I’m just becoming a grumpy old man. Maybe I’m just ashamed that 15-year-old Dylan could most certainly beat the stuffing out of me in any athletic endeavor.

I’m simply wondering if it’s worth marveling at a phenom for a few minutes with the knowledge that they’ll likely never live a normal adolescence. Particularly with YouTube and Twitter and the like, it’s more likely than ever that these actual “diaper dandies” will be overexposed to the point of stunting their maturity.

Ah, who are we kidding? Let’s watch this two-year-old shoot a basketball.