Rock of the 90s

Rock of the 90s Sharing your favorite 90s rock songs
Grunge + Post-grunge + Metal + Alternative

08/09/2026

Rodeo Jones by Sunny Day Real Estate (MTV 120 Minutes 1994)
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In November 1995, Sub Pop released Sunny Day Real Estate's second album, bearing only the label Sunny Day Real Estate. The album was released without cover art or liner notes, and was distributed by Sub Pop as LP2. It has also occasionally been referred to as "The Pink Album", a reference to its solid pink cover. When Sub Pop contacted the band for artwork for the release, the band had nothing to offer, so Goldsmith suggested that they "make it pink". The album included the songs recorded during the brief sessions, as well as tracks such as "Rodeo Jones" that were recorded during the sessions for Diary.

Enigk confessed in an interview in December 2008 that because the band had already broken up during the recording of LP2, he and Hoerner never sat down to complete the lyrics; "We broke up and we just felt like we were done. We put no energy into the artwork or into anything. On a lot of songs, there aren’t lyrics! In a lot of cases, we never sat down to write them, because we just wanted to get it out of the way as fast as possible. So I just sang a lot of gibberish, which makes it really quirky. My favorite is the Japanese translations".

"Red Elephant" was ranked at number 44 on Spin's "The 95 Best Alternative Rock Songs of 1995" list.
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08/07/2026

All The Kids Are Right by Local H (Conan O'Brien 1998)
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Pack Up the Cats is the third studio album by American alternative rock band Local H, released on September 1, 1998, through Island Records. It was their last album on Island before they split from the label, and the last with original drummer Joe Daniels. Local H described the album as "our little concept record about a s**tty mid-level band". The album was released around the time when PolyGram, the parent label of Island, merged with Universal, causing the album to be all but forgotten during the transition.

Pack Up the Cats was recorded in six weeks between April and May 1998 at RTB Audio Visual Productions in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. In May 1998, the band mixed the album at Southern Tracks in Atlanta, Georgia. The album's working title was That Fu***ng Cat. The album was produced by Roy Thomas Baker, who was chosen in part because Local H was listening to classic rock while writing the songs for Pack Up the Cats. The band was hoping for a huge rock sound that wasn't overly polished.
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08/06/2026

Miserable by Lit (Jay Leno 2000)
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Lit's vocalist, A. Jay Popoff, said that "'Miserable' is basically about feeling like you need som**hing really bad, and when you have it, it makes you feel like s**t. Some people feel it's about a person, but it's not necessarily. It can be about addiction."
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07/19/2026

Pretend We're Dead by L7 (Letterman 1992)
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Jennifer Finch, the bassist of L7, tragically passed away at the age of 59 on July 18, 2026. Here is L7's hit song "Pretend We're Dead".

Donita Sparks was in her apartment in Echo Park trying to write lyrics to a cassette she had made. She was heartbroken at the time due to a recent breakup, and she says the first thing that came to her was, "I just pretend that you're dead." She did not mean it as wanting her former paramour to be dead but felt that the only way she could get through the breakup was to pretend he was dead. Then, immediately, in her mind, she thought "I'm not writing that. It's just not gonna happen. What about, "pretend we're dead"?" She liked that because playing dead was a children's game, and it also served as a kind of commentary on Reagan/Bush–era apathy.

Sparks stated that there was an unspoken sentiment in the band that love songs were to be avoided. In an interview regarding the early formation of "Pretend We're Dead" Sparks stated "We chose fierceness and humor over vulnerability because we were, you know, navigating challenging waters — women in hard rock. You had to be tough."
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07/17/2026

Pardon Me by Incubus [Acoustic]
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Incubus lead singer Brandon Boyd was going through a period of unrest when he wrote this song where he vents some steam, particularly on the memorable chorus line, "Pardon me while I burst into flames."

Boyd explained the meaning: "I was in a bookstore, browsing through an old Life magazine, when I saw a picture of what the article called spontaneous human combustion. There were an old guy's legs and shoes, perfectly intact - then, right around his knee area, was just a pile of charred ashes. I was going through some turmoil in my life, both good and bad, and the image struck a chord, so I wrote a song about it."
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07/16/2026

Down By The Water by PJ Harvey (Later with Jools Holland 1995)
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PJ Harvey's mainstream breakthrough in the US was this menacing tune about a woman who drowns her daughter and returns to the scene of the crime, whispering, "little fish, big fish swimming in the water, come back here, man, gimme my daughter." The first part of the haunting refrain was taken from Lead Belly's blues rendition of the folk standard "Salty Dog Blues."

Harvey was hesitant to reveal the meaning behind the song, saying it was "a song I didn't want to put a label on too much, like this isn't a song about some woman drowning her baby. To be quite honest, I don't really know what it is for me, myself, yet - which I don't mind because I'd much rather leave it for other people to do what they want with anyway."

She does point out, however, that her songs aren't strictly autobiographical, especially this one. She lamented in a 2005 Spin interview. "Some critics have taken my writing so literally to the point that they'll listen to 'Down by the Water' and believe I have actually given birth to a child and drowned her."
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07/14/2026

Angry Chair by Alice in Chains (MTV New Years Eve 1992)
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The song was one of the few written entirely by vocalist Layne Staley for the band. In the liner notes of 1999's Music Bank box set collection, guitarist Jerry Cantrell said of the song:
"Such a brilliant song. I'm very proud of Layne for writing it. When I've stepped up vocally in the past he's been so supportive, and here was a fine example of him stepping up with the guitar and writing a masterpiece."
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07/12/2026

The Distance by Cake (1996 Conan O'Brien)
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It is a song about success and failure, and failure of success, really," said singer John McCrea in 2019. "It's a sad song, because there is no success. You can explode into the world with great magnificence, and still feel like the guy underneath the Mickey Mouse head, with the fan batteries that have stopped working properly, and it's dark under there, and everybody wants your autograph."
Brown wanted the guitar riff to be played throughout the entire song, but singer McCrea felt it should be saved for the chorus.
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07/10/2026

Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind (Late Night with Conan O'Brien 1997)
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"Semi-Charmed Life", which sounds like an easygoing pop song, contains lyrics about a drug user's descent into crystal m**h addiction. According to Jenkins, "It's a dirty, filthy song about snorting speed and getting blow jobs." He later explained that, "It's about a time in my life when it seemed like all of my friends just sort of tapped out on speed." He added that the song is "bright and shiny on the surface, and then it just pulls you down in this lockjawed mess ... The music that I wrote for it is not intended to be bright and shiny for bright and shiny's sake. It's intended to be what the seductiveness of speed is like, represented in music."
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07/08/2026

Lightning Crashes by Live (2 Meter Sessions 1995)
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Lead singer Ed Kowalczyk said, "I wrote 'Lightning Crashes' on an acoustic guitar in my brother's bedroom shortly before I had moved out of my parents' house and gotten my first place of my own." Kowalczyk says that the video for "Lightning Crashes" has caused misinterpretations of the song's intent.

"While the clip is shot in a home environment, I envisioned it taking place in a hospital, where all these simultaneous deaths and births are going on, one family mourning the loss of a woman while a screaming baby emerges from a young mother in another room. Nobody's dying in the act of childbirth, as some viewers think. What you're seeing is actually a happy ending based on a kind of transference of life."
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