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.