Project 30: Songs From 1994

1994 was probably the most eventful year of my entire life.  I tend to rattle on longer than I should in these pieces, so I will try to be as brief as I can because I could write a book about 1994. 

 My earliest memory of 1994 was the death of Kurt Cobain.  Like many aspiring musicians at the time, I was deeply inspired by Nirvana and while I wouldn’t say I idolized Kurt, I definitely saw him as an inspiration, a guru. His death hit hard.  I am not a scrapbook making person, I don’t even like looking at them, but I made a Kurt scrapbook using all of the photos and bits of texts I could find and cut out of the dozens of magazines I had laying around.  It was my way of grieving I guess.  I just found the scrapbook at my mom’s house last year and couldn’t look at it.  I put it in the recycle bin. 

More big events:  I graduated high school.  I went to Lollapallooza and met the Flaming Lips, who signed my copy of Providing Needles for your Balloons.  I took a road trip to North Dakota with a friend and drove straight home to Minnesota from the Mt. Rushmore area on no sleep and lots of pot, hallucinating by the time I rolled into my driveway.  I moved away from home and started college.  I helped friends move away from their homes to start college.  We were now out in the world for the first time, on our own.  I made long journeys to visit those friends, who had been part of my close-knit group but were now scattered across the state.  I experienced dorm life, and hated it, and skipped out of my dorm contract to live lease-free in a town-house with new friends.  At that townhouse I had my first new-music-knocking-me-on-my-ass experience of 1994.  One night I was in my room and heard a strange, droning version of You Are My Sunshine wafting down the hall from another room.  Like a hungry cartoon character being pulled through the air by the scent of food, I drifted out of my room. I found myself at my roommate Mike’s door saying “What.  Is.  THAT?”  He showed me the album I Could Live in Hope by a new band called Low and I BEGGED him to let me borrow it.  He handed it to me and I listened to it repeatedly for the rest of the night.  The next day I went to the Electric Fetus and bought my own copy.  Up until that album, I had no idea a band could be so deliberately slow and minimal.  It was beautiful and enchanting and sparse and I have had a deep affection for Low ever since.  Mimi’s passing in 2022 was absolutely heartbreaking. 

 1994 began with a tragedy (Kurt) and ended with a near-tragedy.  Late that December, while driving along an arrow-straight stretch of country road with my good friend who I wanted to be my girlfriend but was too cowardly to do anything about, I hit a patch of black ice and rolled my truck three times, totaling it.  We were listening to Transmissions from the Satellite Heart by the Flaming Lips. The song Superhumans was playing. “One in a while, the time will come, to surrender everything you have to give…” CRASH.   In the seconds after the crash, as we sat upside-down in the truck making sure we were both alive (neither of us had so much as a scratch), everything was dead silent.  Then the stereo abruptly came back on. “I would have given up for you!  I know they’re gonna bump and collide!”  I laughed so hard.  We both laughed.  If you’ve ever laughed in the face of disaster, you know how amazing it feels.  My beloved truck was dead, but my friend and I were both alive and unharmed, despite not wearing any seatbelts.  We had rolled into a safe part of ditch that sat squarely between a massive hole and a massive pile of dirt that had been removed from the hole.  Hitting either of those things would have given this story a much different ending.  The next day I had a girlfriend.  

So, my songs.  Many of my favorite artists had albums out in 1994. But for me, The Flaming Lips and Low are the standouts because of the deeply personal experiences I had with both.  Bad Days has been my personal anthem for many years (I always look forward to Dreamland), and has been one of my favorite Flaming Lips songs since it came out.  While officially being a track from the 1995 album Clouds Taste Metallic, it was first released in 1994 on an often overlooked album that the Lips hastily threw together to have something to give their legions of new fans in 1994.  If you’ve never heard Providing Needles, check it out.  It’s a fun hodge-podge of random recordings, including some recorded at the old Northern Lights in Minneapolis.  For my version, I was in the slowdrone mindset after spending some time with Low, so I thought it would be interesting to take the upbeat song and turn it into more of a minimalistic lullaby.  It's just guitar and some weirdo synth. The lyrics worked well with the different tone and I like the results. 

Sunshine is already a cover, so I felt a little hesitant about covering a cover, but I decided to do it faithfully and add just a little bit of my own cosmic goop in the second half.  There are several songs on I Could Live in Hope that I wanted to cover, but I thought that more than any other Sunshine would be a fitting tribute to my relationship with the band since it was the one that hooked me.  I’m happy with the results, and if you like what you hear and have never spent any time with Low, start at the beginning and give them a try.  There’s truly never been another band like them.  

I also just noticed while writing this that my submissions “Bad Days” and “Sunshine” pair cutely with my previous submission “Good Day Sunshine”.  This was not intentional, but I give the Universe a high five for making it happen.