We're in stereo

The Verve Pipe - Villains

I think the first time I listened to The Verve Pipe's Villains was when I realized how truly awesome a power music had over me. For christmas in 1997, my grandparents got me my first discman (as well as a handful of CDs, this one included). The day was just like pretty much any other family holiday... lots of talking and children screaming, running around. I was 14, an only child, and had two or three cousins by that time. They were much younger than me, of course, so I was stuck in the uncomfortable middle - not being young enough to play with them, but too young to really be with the adults. So for a good portion of whatever holiday it was, I'd probably be off by myself, reading a book or watching television, or whatever I could find until it was time for dinner.

Well, this Christmas, I had something new to occupy my attention. I took my cd player and went off to a quiet room away from all the holiday chaos, and carefully opened the discman and every cd. I didn't really know much about The Verve Pipe except that they did that one song that everyone was loving that year, I dunno, something about being a freshman. But I put it in and started skipping around tracks until I found one that had a good intro, and it turned out to be the album's title track, Villains. Now, the song starts out with a clean electric riff in the left ear, and it goes on for a little while, enough for me to relax and get into the sound of it. Then, Brian Vander Ark whispers in my right ear (I turned the volume up this morning) and I shoot up out of my chair, startled that someone had snuck up behind me. It took me a little while to figure out what had happened, but when I did, I had to look at that little black cd player a bit differently. Afterwards, I sat back down and listened carefully to every second of that album, excited as to what a pair of headphones could bring to my ears. It was such a different kind of sound than what I heard from a desktop boombox, or even my dad's big stereo. Somehow, I had never really noticed until now that there was a lot more to music than just the song - the instrumentation, the mixing, production - all these things that I'd never really noticed before. And even though I was only 14 and barely knew what any of those words really meant, I knew that there was something going on that I was only scratching the surface of.

Plug in, and turn it up...