Bright and Poppy and Fun

Think Tank #30

Today I’d like to talk about an upbeat album called New Miserable Experience.

Yeah. You read that right.

Even the name sounds like a contradiction. The music sounds bright and uplifting, but if you listen to the lyrics, the songs have a dark twist to them. If you choose not to pay attention to this, New Miserable Experience can be a fun, mellow soundtrack to a scenic drive or a beach vacation.

That’s only if you choose not to pay attention.

There’s a dark side to the Gin Blossoms. The band’s frontman at the time was a guy named Doug Hopkins. He was one of the original founders of the band, he played guitar, and he wrote the bulk of the music.

He was also a raging alcoholic. He battled depression for years (an affliction which no doubt fueled his drinking problem). During recording sessions for the second album, he would get so drunk that he couldn’t stand. It got so bad that he ended up getting kicked out of his own band.

He killed himself in 1993, shortly after receiving his first gold record. New Miserable Experience had come out only one year prior.

How can someone blow something so great? He’d become a star. All he had to do was stick it out and try not to die, and the world would’ve been his.

The next Gin Blossoms album was titled Congratulations I’m Sorry—a reference to the strange feeling of the remaining band members being congratulated on the success of New Miserable Experience and consoled for the loss of their former bandmate.

It encapsulates the contradiction that is Gin Blossoms. How can something so beautiful be so sad?

It’s a pretty rare thing. The world has seen plenty of tortured artists. The 90s were chock full of ill-fated musicians. Most of their music reflected this. For example, it would’ve come as no surprise that the lead singer of a band like Alice in Chains was pretty messed up in the head.

They say that people who suffer from depression put on a brave face and mask how sad they are. But music comes from a place more visceral than this. You can’t really fake a brilliant album, the way you can fake your way through a conversation.

How can music so bright, so cheerful-sounding come out of a person carrying this much pain?

My personal favorite song of theirs, “Hey Jealousy,” is the perfect reflection of this. The song has a nostalgic sound—it evokes more of a sorrowful feeling than the rest of the album. Yet it’s still bright and poppy and fun, and if you don’t pay attention to the lyrics, it’s easy to imagine that the singer is recalling a happy memory with fondness instead of longing for a future that will never exist.

The song is linked above. If you haven’t already, give it a listen.

If you have, listen to it again. Hell, listen to the whole album. It’s really good. And as you do, take a moment to think of Doug Hopkins, a man who hurt so much that he rendered himself unconscious, while holding all of this potential inside.