On June 7th, 2024, Stone Temple Pilots’ second studio album Purple celebrated its thirtieth birthday. This album is older than me by eight years. It’s somewhat alienating to have such a deep connection to music that was released long enough ago that the way we listen to music has completely changed in that time (I can’t relate to stories of listening to this album on a CD, for example) but recent enough that its fans are on Twitter.
I am also unlike many of the fans of Purple in the sense that I did not first encounter it as a whole album. I first came across the album’s two biggest singles, “Interstate Love Song” and “Vasoline”. I can track the exact point where I first listened to these songs: February 3rd 2020 for “Interstate Love Song” and March 14th 2021 for “Vasoline”. I was studying in my Sixth Form common room when I first encountered “Interstate Love Song”. I heard “Vasoline” for the first time the day before I permanently moved away from my mother.
When I was in my second year of university, my therapist advised me to sing a song to regulate my breathing. “Interstate Love Song” is my baseline radio, it feels like it’s playing in my body, on a loop, on a cellular level. So when I get to the point of anxiety where my prefrontal cortex shuts off and I’m about to have a panic attack, this song rises into my consciousness and is the only thing that comes to mind to sing. “Vasoline” is the other most likely Stone Temple Pilots song to crop up in playlists, so it too got its fair share of plays, but the rest of the album was still waiting for me to discover it.
It’s fitting that Purple turns 30 in June because to me it’s a summer album. Many of the memories I associate with it are baked in heat, hay fever, and takeaway margaritas sold by a local branch of a Mexican chain restaurant. For me, the biggest song from Purple was “Big Empty” by quite a stretch. My statsforspotify shows that I’ve streamed this 156 times in the time since I first heard it at 16:36 on May 10th 2023 - ten more than the next biggest hitter on this album, “Still Remains”, which I first listened to on the same day. In 2023 I undertook a project to listen to an album every week, and that week had been Purple’s turn.
“Big Empty” dominated my listening for the next few months. Something about the way it collapses into the chorus felt like joyful defeat, which is exactly how I felt after the end of my degree brought the three most stressful years of my life to a close. It was over. And in those 156 listens I was able to feel that closure again and again and again. Summer 2023 was an odd time in my life. It was something of a gestation period. After exams mercifully shut the door on the ‘student’ part of my life, I spent that summer waiting for the next part to begin.
Islamic scholars, the hierophants of my childhood, group upbringing into three stages: ages 0-7, 7-14, and 14-21. From 21 onwards you’re fully responsible for your actions. That summer I was grieving the innocent chapter of my life, finally closed at the age of 21. I had an awareness that my life would change so dramatically from this point that worrying about the future was futile. The details of my new life were beyond my comprehension.
Even still, the wistful whining of “Still Remains” conjures the cold of my iced coffee cup (reusable, stolen Starbucks stock) burning into my hand on the walk to the library. The strongest flavour from this time is cold brew coffee. At the beginning of that summer I still worked my job as a shift manager at Starbucks, which gave me unfiltered (ha) access to vast vats of the stuff, plus shot after shot of blonde roast espresso. (Not sponsored by Starbucks but if you lot want to bring back the Original Nut Blend I’ll take that as payment for promoting your shit coffee AND as an apology for overtaking grunge as Seattle’s most famous export.) I’d get home late from the library, and would shake off the stale papery smell with a glass of Porta 6 and dance around my room with my vape in hand screaming along to this album. Side dishes included Alanis Morisette’s ‘You Oughta Know’, Jerry Cantrell’s ‘Cut You In’, and the Foo Fighters’ ‘Stranger Things Have Happened’. (It was a time of diverse emotions.)
After exams, too, the album stuck with me. The gleam of my suncreamed legs bronzing among the grass in the Fellows’ Garden, resembling a Pinterest picture like a veneer over my rising panic about my tattoo ink bleaching as the skin around it darkens. I’m wearing my favourite pair of sunglasses - black, from H&M and with gold detailing around the sides but the exact perfect shape to give me the hungover rockstar look I’ve seen in 90s magazines. That summer I lost those sunglasses twice; bought them, then bought them again, £20 spent on nothing. I guess you could say I spent a penny trying to look pretty and in the end it just cost me a “Pretty Penny”. (ha)
And when I left university altogether and was staying in Cambridge to work at a shitty chain Italian restaurant, the sounds of this album formed as much of my summer as work gossip and the daily train commute. The grittiness of the kale smoothie I’d buy when it was on sale in Sainsbury’s still sitting in my throat, I’d clock out of my shift, headphones already blaring “Unglued”.
Lighting changes an environment so much: lunchtime tables in daylight, the yellow of the dinner rush, a different scene depending on whether or not the neon signs behind the bar would be switched on. But I particularly loved it when it dimmed or there were no lights at all, walking from the light switches to lock the front doors - the last job of the close - in a childlike rush lit only by the green of the fire exit light.
There were two nights we dimmed the lights while still hosting people. Real people, not customers, with both occasions being for parties for staff and as a favour of a friend of our manager’s, unbeknownst to the ‘big bosses’. The scene both times was less illuminated by light but the clandestine thrill of acts forbidden. Cigarettes, pasta, and stolen bottles of Birra Moretti are the flavours of “Unglued” for me.
The street lights dancing in their reflection on the river, which when I was studying there often felt like the river Styx and looked the part when it turned to night. I had my phone up to my ear, sunscreen and sebum greasing up the screen like always. It had gotten cold since the sun had gone down (it was England, after all, which never stays warm for too long) but despite the chill and my whinging muscles I was sitting on a bench a thirty second walk away from where I was living that summer. I was a thirty second walk away from where I was living that summer, yet I was not inside my flat, because I was complaining.
The long-distance bitch session is so special in the modern world and is made even more of an event when it takes place on a street around the corner from where you actually live. The inability to speak freely in your own home is infuriating but it transforms a simple phone call into an occasion. You’re forced to store up your whinging and let it all out in one rancid, and scheduled, breath. I’m trying to be more positive but back then the long-distance bitch was a lifeline that got me through work stress, visa troubles, and difficult roommates.
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It’s now a year since my listening to this album was at its height and a week until I visit the UK for the first time since I moved abroad. A year older, I’m in a new environment with new people but, graciously, I still have access to old music. People who first listened to this album in 1994 can use Spotify to take them back to their childhoods; life moves so fast that even listening to Purple a year later I feel like I too am being transported to a more naïve time.
Listening back to Purple, the changes in the little details of my life come to the surface. Now, the cheapest and strongest espresso I can find for my machine starts my day instead of the endless sugary concoctions I used to make at work. Marlboro reds have replaced mint flavoured e-liquid. I can’t remember the last time I had a Tesco meal deal. But in listening to Purple now, just for the period of the album’s 47 minute runtime, the feelings and flavours of summer 2023 can come back and overpower their replacements.