Blind Melon - Soup @blindmelonband #blindmelon #shannonhoon #90s #90smusic #90srock I had a conversation with a friend about Blind Melon yesterday and he told me that they were his favorite band of all time. It felt odd that we'd never discussed it before, but after he showed me paintings of Shannon and autographed merch from the band and even a little corner of his music room dedicated to keepsakes and collectibles, I was convinced. I have an interesting background with loving this band too. My mom loved Janis Joplin her whole life until she died by suicide at the very end of my teens. I remember her listening to Pearl when everyone but she and I were in the house and I remember loving how gritty and soulful her voice sounded. One day I heard No Rain on MTV during a super hot summer spent mostly on the couch under an A/C vent and I thought about how similar their voices sounded to me. I didn't much like No Rain and that got worse as it became one of the most overplayed songs of all time, but a local pizza joint had the Tones of Home 7" on their jukebox and I was HOOKED. I mowed a couple of laws and bought the cassette and spent a lot of the summer swapping out my bootleg cassette of Nevermind with the Blind Melon s/t album. I fell in love with Dear ol' Dad next and realized this band was nothing like the dreampop revival nonsense MTV and Capitol were billing them as re: No Rain. They were roots-centric gritty rock music that had some folk and even psych influences, sure, but not so much to say they could be pigeonholed by either. It's cliché to say a band is a genre of their own, but I have never been able to think of another band that sounds like a Blind Melon clone nor can I pick out any single influence that could make them seem anything but original. Soup was my favorite release from the band and like so many amazing musicians from this stretch in time, we lost Shannon Hoon to the vices of a troubled soul thrust deep into a spotlight of pressure and criticism. I sometimes wonder if Janis's soul lived inside Shannon for a time and maybe he channeled and merged his own energy with hers to create some of the most cherished music I've ever heard. https://www.instagram.com/p/CEzX-kUHEEH/?igshid=qrl47tqo9wrh
