Credit: Libby Hamant
Songs I Wish I Wrote is a monthly column that assembles new and old songs for Ohio State’s music lovers.
Click here to listen to the “Songs I Wish I Wrote: Wishing 1994’s best tracks a happy 30th birthday” playlist on Spotify.
A great album is like a great friend. Listen to it carefully, understand and appreciate all its eccentricities and, in return, it’s always there for you.
An album’s anniversary, then, is like a friend’s birthday. When a beloved album celebrates a birthday, particularly a significant one, it’s common for fans to spend quality time with its music and reflect on the memories it has defined.
Throughout this year, I’ve found myself honoring a handful of albums celebrating their 30th anniversaries.
With the year 1994 came an abundance of genre-defining records, but since alternative rock is what I know best, I’ve focused on some songs that loosely fall under that umbrella for this playlist. While only offering a taste of how exciting 1994 must have been for music lovers, it comprises some of my most cherished tunes.
I hope you love them as much as I do — you’re all invited to the 30th birthday party.
“Roman Candle” by Elliott Smith
Not only is “Roman Candle” the title track to singer-songwriter Elliott Smith’s debut album — released in July 1994 — but it’s also the opening track. Therefore, it serves as a formal introduction to Smith as a solo artist, coming at a time when he was still playing with the more aggressive alternative-rock outfit Heatmiser.
Quietly simmering with the uncomfortable intimacy and desolate instrumentation that came to be characteristic of Smith’s early work, “Roman Candle” looks listeners straight in the eyes, trembling with rage but refusing to let anyone escape its gaze.
Already apparent in this early track is Smith’s ear for powerful arrangements and melodies. Each time he repeats, “I want to hurt him, I want to give him pain,” the song’s contained intensity rears its head, threatening to boil over at any second. Though frail and flammable, this song is ultimately an announcement of a force to be reckoned with.
“Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden
Though I love a deep cut, I wouldn’t disagree with the idea that, sometimes, a band’s most popular song is its most popular song for good reason.
Soundgarden’s biggest hit — and the centerpiece of its sprawling, career-best release, “Superunknown” — “Black Hole Sun” is a perfect example.
This apocalyptic plea is a quintessential example of the band’s capacity for crafting tight, anthemic hits without sacrificing its hard-rock ferocity. The track is pristinely polished and seductively melodic, but also surges with unsilenceable dread and desperation.
As hooky as this grunge anthem is, its musical architecture is rather unusual. The hypnotic guitar riff dips into psychedelic waters, as do frontman Chris Cornell’s abstract, imagistic lyrics.
If any voice could have been capable of making the world stop, of conjuring a “black hole sun” to wash the world away, it would have been Cornell’s.
“I Stay Away” by Alice in Chains
By 1994, Alice in Chains had established its metal-influenced sound with two full-length albums, which were distinctive for their gargantuan force and tempestuous climates.
For such a hard-hitting band, the idea of a more bare-bones sound may have been questionable. But 1992’s largely acoustic EP “Sap” evinced the striking potential in allowing Jerry Cantrell and Layne Staley’s introspective lyrics to take the forefront against delicate, stripped-back arrangements.
“Sap” is a fine foray into more intimate musical territory, but Alice’s second, largely acoustic EP, 1994 release “Jar of Flies,” is a revelatory paragon of the band’s versatility.
“Jar of Flies” commences with two of the band’s biggest tearjerkers — which is saying something, considering the general soul-scraping bleakness of its discography — but the record’s third offering, “I Stay Away,” is a radiant, if temporal, light at the end of the tunnel from its bright opening chords.
Vocally augmented by Cantrell’s texture-building harmonies, Staley sounds victorious and renewed. His ever-untouchable voice, devastatingly disintegrated by drug abuse during the following two years, is at the pinnacle of its power as it soars over the exultant, symphonious instrumentation.
Staley’s opening declaration — “Yeah, hey, I want to travel south this year” — leaves much to the imagination. Where exactly does he want to go? Why south, and why this year?
He sings with such conviction to overpower and disquiet the grim forecasts delivered on the preceding tracks. Like the first rays of sun to peek out of the dawn, there’s hope he will go somewhere warmer and brighter, if only within the song’s newborn world.
“Better Man” by Pearl Jam
Pearl Jam singer and lyricist Eddie Vedder wrote “Better Man” long before attaining rockstar super fame — in fact, he was only a high schooler.
Pearl Jam initially intended to release “Better Man” on 1992’s “Vs.,” rescinded it from the track list due to hesitations about releasing something with such pop potential.
The song’s sweetly melodic sensibility makes it irresistible to a broad audience — which is perhaps contrary to most alternative rock bands’ ambitions — and cements the tune’s place among the band’s finest tracks.
From its faint beginning to its vigorous, full-band conclusion, this ballad swells with heart, brimming with poignant empathy towards its subject, a hopeless woman — who happens to be inspired by Vedder’s mother, making it all the more of a tearjerker — stuck in an unfulfilling relationship. Whether you belt or sob along, this gripping track is undeniably magnetic.
“Grace” by Jeff Buckley
“Grace is what matters. In anything, especially life, especially growth, tragedy, pain, love, death, it sort of keeps you alive, and it keeps you open for more understanding,” Jeff Buckley once said in a conversation with MuchMusic about his 1994 record, “Grace.”
“Grace” stood alone as Buckley’s lone completed studio album, as he tragically drowned not even three years after its release.
It’s maddening to imagine what more Buckley could have created; still, any artist would be lucky to have their legacy resting entirely upon a record even half as imposing as “Grace.”
Like Buckley’s definition of “grace,” the album embodies everything that makes people feel truly alive — unending heartache, invincible love, half-lucid dreams and bittersweet goodbyes.
Fittingly, the rousing title track is an all-encompassing meditation on life and death, a hymn of love’s eternality against the “clicking of time.” Listen closely, and you’ll hear a clock’s strokes; Buckley’s arrangements are as intentional as his poetry.
As lyrically mind-bending as “Grace” is, Buckley doesn’t need words to seize listeners’ hearts and blow their minds. Simply put, his voice was not of this earth. Buckley doesn’t just show off; whether a hissed whisper, transcendent falsetto or ecstatic wail, his voice is a sacred medium for blazing, unbridled feeling.
“Where Did You Sleep Last Night” by Nirvana
Little did the audience for Nirvana’s outstanding “MTV Unplugged” performance know that in mere months, frontman Kurt Cobain would be found dead in his Seattle home.
In retrospect, the downcast opening chords to set closer, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” — a bluesy murder ballad famously recorded by folk and blues legend Lead Belly in the 1940s — seem to be the harbingers of a haunting farewell.
Though the “MTV Unplugged” show was recorded in November 1993, the album wasn’t released until almost a year later, just months after Cobain’s death, rendering the whole record, especially “Where Did You Sleep,” particularly poignant.
Cobain’s guttural scream at the end of the track is unforgettable. Seeming desperate for some impossible release, he pushes his voice to the brink of collapse, shattering with it whatever distance there was between himself and the listener.
His subsequent exhale, that last gasp for air proceeding the track’s funereal finale, is just as chilling.
