Let’s leave, oh let’s get away, get lost in time/Where there’s no reason left to hide
The first CD I ever owned was Creed’s Human Clay. I got it for my 12th birthday. The second and third CDs I ever owned were Creed’s other two albums, My Own Prison and Weathered, which I got a month later for Christmas. I was not at all aware at the time that Creed were one of the most derided bands of their era, and I’m glad for that. One of the great things about loving music when you’re young is that you do so without pretense or insecurity. Those things come later. What comes first, at least from my experience, is a fierce connection to the words and the melodies and the way the songs make you feel. Such was the case, for me, with Creed, especially in the winter of 2002-03 when those three albums – Weathered in particular – became the soundtrack to a particularly fraught period in my young life.
Winters in northern Michigan can be an endless and endlessly depressing stretch of time, especially when you’re constantly falling ill during them. That was my situation in January and February 2003, when I caught seemingly every version of cold or flu that was out there. I missed a lot of school that season, and I remember feeling like I was slowly becoming untethered from reality because I was spending so much time away from my friends, teachers, and classes. And, as a result, I was falling behind in said classes, which only added to the stress of the situation. I was just 12 years old, and my sixth-grade academic pursuits, in retrospect, weren’t exactly the high-stakes things I made them out to be at the time. In the moment, though, I felt like my life was falling apart and the consequences were going to be dire. And meanwhile, the weather was cold and snowy and dark and gloomy, like Mother Nature was taking my inner feelings and turning them into a backdrop for the whole world.
It was the most depressing season of my life, and it was also the first time I retreated to music to find comfort. Weathered felt revelatory to me back then, especially “Hide.” I remember reading on the internet that Creed frontman Scott Stapp wrote “Hide” after escaping the strict, abusive household where he grew up. While the song carries those scars in its DNA, they aren’t its most pervasive elements. Rather, “Hide” comes across as immensely hopeful – a song about the gift of finding a new beginning and a second chance and embracing it head-on. It’s a track about not shrinking in the face of the bad things that have happened to you, or even the bad things you may have done, but to be proudly who you are, scars and all, and to live whatever the next chapter is bravely.
Those messages hit me on a soul-deep level. I really did feel like I was hiding from everything at that time, cloistered away in my bedroom, whiling away all those hours when I should have been at school. Many of those hours were spent with Weathered playing in my CD player, and hearing “Hide” over and over again slowly gave me the courage to absorb its lessons and stop hiding from what was waiting for me out in the world.
Eventually, I got over my many illnesses, went back to school, and re-integrated into the life I’d spent much of the winter detached from. When I did that, I put Weathered away and didn’t revisit it much for many years. That summer, my older brother taught my sister and I how to download songs and burn our own CDs, which meant a new soundtrack for brighter days. It was an exciting time marked by music discovery, but it also meant learning more about music and the way the wider world contextualized it, which led to internalizing all the negative things everyone else was saying about my de-facto favorite band.
Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about “outgrowing” music they loved when they were young, or maybe even becoming ashamed of it. For the most part, that’s never been me. As this series of essays will attest, I still have a vast amount of affection for almost every band I’ve ever loved. Creed, for a long time, were one of the very few exceptions. I came to view them as a “false start,” the band I listened to a lot for a few months before I found my way toward the music that actually changed my life.
It’s only been recently that I’ve been able to go back to Creed – again, Weathered in particular – and hear the songs with the same fondness that I hear so much of the other music I grew up with. I’m not the only one: in the post-pandemic years, Creed have reunited their original lineup and become a massive live music draw. Nostalgia is fueling a lot of that demand, but not all of it. This 2024 piece from Billboard details how the band’s songs have found their way into the sports world, or into viral TikTok videos, reaching and impacting people who weren’t even alive when Creed were lighting up the radio. Even SZA, one of the most critically-adored artists of the past decade, has identified herself as a proud Creed fan.
It gets more mind-boggling: Earlier this year, Creed scored their first-ever number 1 hit on a Billboard chart, when “One Last Breath,” another cut from 2001’s Weathered, summitted the Hard Rock Streaming Songs chart. I couldn’t believe it. Two decades ago, I figured that 1) Creed would stay broken up forever, and 2) they would always be a punchline in the annals of rock history. Instead, they’re arguably bigger now than they were in their heyday, and most of their baggage has fallen away. It is, frankly, an amazing comeback story, and it strikes me that that’s kind of what “Hide” is all about. These guys were down for the count: broken up and widely loathed, with a frontman whose demons and struggles with substance abuse seemed destined to overshadow, forever, whatever he’d accomplished in the music industry. Now, they’re playing concerts to crowds of 30,000 people. I can’t help but feel extremely happy for them.
The overall cultural reassessment of Creed probably helped soften my feelings toward this band again, but I think time would have done that anyway. The further I get from my youth, the fonder I am of the things that remind me of it – even the less happy parts. And for all that I made a show of writing Creed off after I realized they were a punchline-status band, I’d be lying if I said that their best songs don’t hold up. I don’t have much use for the band’s louder, heavier, crunchier post-grunge side, and I didn’t back then either. But their big, yearning mainstream power ballad side – the side that delivered smash singles like “My Sacrifice,” “One Last Breath,” “With Arms Wide Open,” and “Higher” – still hits for me, especially now that the whole idea of the big, yearning mainstream rock power ballad has pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur.
The Creed comeback has been fun to witness. I got a big kick out of “Higher” inexplicably becoming the unofficial theme song of the Texas Rangers and their 2023 World Series victory. I got a big kick out of belting that song out with friends at recent karaoke session, too. I loved listening to the guys on the Carl Landry Record Club, a music podcast I really enjoy, gush unabashedly about how much they dig Weathered in an episode that came out about a year ago. And it’s been fun going back to all these songs I loved when I was 12 and loving them again, without all the self-consciousness that built up around them over the years. I’m not sure I’d have any interest in seeing this band live, or even in hearing a new album from them at this point, but who knows? Actually, now that I think about it, there’s a fourth Creed album, released in 2009, that I have never, ever listened to. Maybe now I finally will.
Regardless, I’m happy to restore this band’s place in my own musical journey, and to pay tribute to how much “Hide” meant to me at a vulnerable moment in my life. Connecting to that song, at that time, in the extremely emotional way that I did, probably had a more formative impact on me and my musical evolution than I have ever acknowledged. Well, until now, that is. But this series would be incomplete without this song, and without this band, and I’m happy to honor both.