Plush

"Plush" is the song that made Stone Temple Pilots famous and got them accused of being carpetbaggers, and three decades of distance have mostly settled the argument in their favor. Dean DeLeo's opening figure is a bluesy, open-voiced G-to-D-ish progression that's more Zeppelin than Seattle, and the arrangement is unusually generous with dynamics: verses that breathe, a pre-chorus that gathers, then a chorus that opens like a door. The recording's warmth — Brendan O'Brien's production gives the guitars body rather than sludge — is what separates it from its contemporaries; this is a rock band that likes hooks and doesn't apologize. Scott Weiland sings in that dark, vibrato-heavy baritone, closer to Jim Morrison than Vedder despite what everyone said in 1993, and the lyric's origin is genuinely grim: a news story about a murdered girl found in a wooded area near San Diego. The words stay impressionistic — "and I feel that time's a wasted go / so where ya going to tomorrow?" — dread without narrative. The unplugged version later proved the song was structurally sound, not just loud. It belongs to the specific pleasure of hearing a huge chorus arrive exactly when your body predicted it — a driving song, a bar-jukebox song, a song that never needed permission to be enjoyable.