1993: The Year Everything Was Right in Front of Me

OOD PLAYLISTS

1993: The Year Everything Was Right in Front of Me

The songs from my musical home year—and the year I had everything right in front of me and didn’t reach for it.

1993 | BOULDER, DENVER, AND A YEAR THAT STILL WON’T SETTLE DOWN

OOD Playlists is where the songs get gathered by year, artist, mood, place, memory, or whatever else makes them belong together. The list matters, but the reason for the list is the post.

This one is my musical home year. I was twenty-eight, living in downtown Boulder, working at IBM during the day, and keeping several other versions of myself running at night.

The playlist has Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Snoop Dogg, Mazzy Star, Liz Phair, Morphine, and everything else that somehow still belonged on the same shelf. The links are at the bottom. There’s no official order. Hit shuffle and let the year argue with itself.

This is my list of favorite songs released in 1993.

There's no particular order to it. I like it best on shuffle. That's closer to how I actually lived that year — nothing lined up, nothing sorted, nothing in its right room.

I'd moved to Colorado in 1991. Big direction change. By 1993 I was twenty-eight, living in downtown Boulder. Working at IBM during the day. Doing a lot of other things at night.

We saw Pearl Jam twice that November at Balch Fieldhouse on the CU campus, on the Vs. tour. About three weeks later we caught Nirvana at the Denver Coliseum on the In Utero tour, with the Breeders and Melvins opening.

All of it inside an hour's drive.

This year feels like my musical home more than any other. 1977 was a year I listened to as a kid getting his bearings — looking back at it now is half memory, half borrowed history. 1993 I was inside of. My taste was already mine. I knew what I liked. I bought it on purpose. I went to see it in person.

Alternative was big enough to be its own format by then, but Colorado put its own filter on it. Boulder was a college town with money and weirdos in equal measure. Denver was bigger, harder edges. Both were close enough that you could be at a show in either one any night of the week. And we mostly were.

People love a clean story about 1993. Grunge broke. Pearl Jam outsold everyone. Nirvana made In Utero to scare off the people who showed up late. Alt-rock won.

What I remember is closer to: everything still fit on the same shelf. Siamese Dream and Doggystyle. Vs. and Ten Summoner's Tales. Exile in Guyville and August and Everything After. Rid of Me and Cure for Pain. Undertow and Spilt Milk. Records you bought because somebody played you one song, once, late, when you were half-listening but it stuck anyway.

You get "Today" and "Cannonball."
You get "Mr. Jones" and "Heart-Shaped Box."
You get "Linger" and "Gin and Juice."
You get "Fade Into You" and "Are You Gonna Go My Way" in the same year, and somehow that didn't seem strange.

Nothing was making sense in any organized way. Nothing had to.

I had room to run a few versions of myself back then. IBM gave me a lot of latitude for a twenty-something — work was real, but it wasn't the whole thing. So there was the work persona, the Boulder persona, the show persona, and the late-night persona. They didn't always agree, but they didn't have to. I kept them in different rooms.

The drugs weren't the cause of any of it. They were a feature. I was young enough to think I was getting away with them, same as I thought I was getting away with the rest.

I was in love with a girl I'd quietly written off as simple. Beautiful, but not the kind of person who was going to figure me out. I was wrong about that. She saw straight through every persona I had running, and she saw what was underneath, which was less than I'd been telling myself it was.

She wasn't a particularly good person either, and we weren't a good idea. On paper this should have been the easiest situation in the world to walk away from.

I was in love.

She could read me cold, and I was in love with her, and at twenty-eight that was the most uncomfortable combination I could think up.

This was the part where I should have committed to something.

The work track was open. The social scene was open. The relationship was right there, complicated as it was.

I didn't choose.

I won't pretend I know why. I've thought about it a lot, and the closest I can get is that running parallel lives felt more honest than picking one. Like everything else that year, I wanted them all to be true at the same time. So I kept them all going until I couldn't anymore.

That's the part I look back on the most. Not the shows, though the shows were unbelievable. Not the records, though I still play them. The thing I sit with is that everything was right in front of me, and I didn't reach for it, and I still don't fully know why.

It's a mess.

It's also the most magical time of my life.

A good year should be a mess. I said that about 1977. I still mean it. But 1977 was a year I watched from a bedroom in junior high. 1993 was a year I was in the middle of, and the mess wasn't on the radio — it was me.

This playlist isn't trying to settle that.

It's the songs from a year I keep going back to. The ones that still hold up. The ones that drag me back to Balch with the floor shaking, or to the Denver Coliseum that December, or to a downtown apartment in Boulder where I was trying very hard not to ask myself any of the questions I should have been asking.

Hit shuffle. Let it argue with itself.

That's the year.

What belongs on your version of 1993—or what did I get completely wrong?