While many of my CDs conjure up memories some of them inspire sensations. This #samiam disc puts the taste of cheap home brewed coffee in my mouth. It also reminds me that feeling of laying in a warm bed near a frost covered window, feeling the chill radiate towards my face and hands as I study lyrics in this CD booklet. In fact it is this exact well worn booklet. I bought this exact compact disc in the fall of 1991 and it became my companion in my small, dingy college apartment in a small college town near the Pennsylvania border. At the time my collection of music was pretty small but well used. I couldn't afford much, and I would easily sacrifice food money for a new disc of music. So the discs I had I became intimately familiar with. Because being that broke also created a lot of alone down time. Time I spent memorizing and fantasizing about music and the mystical lives the bands must lead. A friend of mine who was really in touch with music turned me on to Samiam and it became a tandem with Nirvana's "nevermind" as two of the Most Important Things in the World. Over time I've grown weary of the overplayed and over analyzed king-of-grunge album, but I've never tired of the sincere and thoughtful downer punk of this album. Today is a dreary cool October day and a perfect day to revisit this album, it was a draining weekend of my youngest son falling ill and I'm welcoming the comfort of a grey autumn monday. I dont imagine this record was written in that spirit and I wonder how many artists would be suprised by the ghosts individual copies of their albums hold for different people. Many years after I absorbed this CD my wife and I caught them live while she was very pregnant with our middle son. The singer suggested that we name the baby after himself. I never told her but I actually mulled that over that night, I liked the romantic connection to my younger life and this discography. I decided to keep that selfish inclination to myself.
