Songoftheday 3/21/23 - Preoccupied without you I cannot live at all, my whole world surrounds you I stumble and I crawl...

 

 

"Blurry" - Puddle Of Mudd

from the album Come Clean (2001)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #5 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 30

 

Today's song comes from the rock group Puddle Of Mudd, who came together in Kansas City, Missouri in the early 1990s. Original a four-piece band with Wes Scantlin singing lead and on rhythm guitar, lead guitarist Jimmie Allen, drummer Kenny Burkitt, and bass player Sean Sammon, their did gigs locally and released an EP (extended play single) Stuck independently in 1994. Allen left shortly after, with Scantlin taking over lead guitar duties for a proper full length album on the indie Hardknocks label, Abrasive, in 1997. At that point, Scantlin got attention from nu-metal fratboy Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit, and on his advice tossed everyone and assembled a new version of the band with guitarist Paul Phillips, bassist Doug Ardito, and drummer Greg Upchurch. They were signed to Durst's vanity label on Geffen Records, Flawless, where they recorded their second album Come Clean, which came out in the summer of 2001. The lead single from the record was "Control", written by Scantlin with Brad Stewart, who went on to play with Shinedown and Fuel. The snarly bad relationship track did well on rock radio, spending five weeks at #3 on Billboard magazine's Mainstream Rock chart, and one week at #3 on the Alternative Rock counterpart. It also made it to the "big" chart, Billboard's Hot 100, peaking at #68. It also became a surprise top-40 hit on the British singles chart at #15. 

The second single from the post-grunge set was "Blurry", a rework of an older song "Electron Moon" when Allen was still in the band, with Ardito and Phillips helping on the rewrite. The song has Wes confronting an estranged lover, vacillating between begging for them back and scorning them for deciding to leave. The "Blurry" refers to the sense of unease because emotions had taken over, which devolves into the bitter chant of "This pain you gave to me Can you take it all away". The production builds and builds, and the double-tracking of Scantlin's voice from producer John Kurzweg (who also produced for Creed) covers the rough spots in his vocals. The music video, directed by Durst, put Wes in the baby daddy role to a child with his mother in an abusive situation, and ends up leaving with the stepfather and her. The heart-pulling nature of it all caught the ear of radio and the public, and it ended up being the band's breakthrough and biggest success...

 

 "Blurry" reached the top ten on Billboard's Hot 100 in May of 2002. On the radio, the song went to #3 on the Mainstream Top-40 airplay chart, #6 on the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format, and topped both the Mainstream (ten weeks) and Alternative (nine weeks) Rock radio lists. Internationally, the single peaked at #8 in the United Kingdom and #9 in New Zealand, and reached the top-40 in Ireland (#18) and Italy (#37). The Come Clean album, released in August of 2001, crested at #9 on the Billboard 200 in March of 2002, going on to sell over three million copies. 

Both Puddle of Mudd and the Come Clean album will be back to the series.

(6/10)

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Here's the band performing the song on the Conan O'Brien Show...

Next up , Puddle Of Mudd in concert in 2002...

And lastly, from a few years ago on Sirius satellite radio...

Up tomorrow: This Aussie queen has quite the earworm.