Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting Napster favorites from the wild-west days of the early internet. This autumn we’re covering the best of 1999: the B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today’s track…
Vertical Horizon, “We Are”
“There’s no way you know this band”, he said, but I had been listening to their new album for months.
It was New Year’s Eve 1999 and we were arguing over the stereo and a copy of Live Stages. Most of the older kids were there, back from their colleges to celebrate what could have well been the end of the world. Drinking because Y2K could be coming turned into drinking because we survived and we got to see the next millennium. We probably all knew everything was going to be okay as we saw news footage of Sydney and Tokyo celebrating ahead of us, confident that 2000 was in hand no matter what. There was still that terror that the virus would strike the United States because we had failed to heed the warnings, that we had seen it all as a joke. We held our breath watching the countdown; I don’t remember Dick Clark but I do remember one of the neighbor kids calling for his younger brother, all of us wanting to be closest to the people we loved the most as we witnessed history.
And then we were in the future. I ran outside proclaiming that the starry night sky was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and that we were so lucky to be alive. We could be anything in this new world, and it was all going to be incredible.
So of course I started the Year 2000 by arguing over music. I had a brand. But I really did know who Vertical Horizon was! The Dave superfans and older kids who convinced me to buy a copy of Farmhouse a few months later weren’t the only ones who could get into cult-following college bands. I’d been handed a copy of “We Are” by a friend who voraciously devoured everything DC101 put on the air, which meant that he also thought Limp Bizkit’s new album was pretty great. None of us bat 1.000, but this upbeat work of guitar tech had me fascinated enough to grab the album right before school started back up. I didn’t know anything about Vertical Horizon, I had never heard a single other note by them, but “We Are” played on my Walkman as I went back and forth to my summer job, as I learned to drive, as I laid around and dreamed of what the future would be like. It permeated my life like very few songs did in The Best Year for Music. Hell yeah, I knew Vertical Horizon; even if this single had stalled out at #53 on the charts I could count them among my favorite new discoveries.
I knew Vertical Horizon so well that I knew that their next single was going to absolutely explode. It was going to be Everything You Want.
This band isn’t going to be the most important D.C.-based 90s band we’re going to cover in the back half of 1999@25, because The Dismemberment Plan is Terrified, but they were probably the most popular. “Everything You Want” wasn’t just a number-one record; it was that kind of number-one record that spills out of the radio and off into every corner of the world. That reverse-warp guitar riff was impossible to ignore, even if it was buried in the radio edit. Pop music always needs a good unrequited-love jam, so why not pick one that has a lot of weird and wonderful stuff going on? So here comes this number-one single that propels Everything You Want to multi-platinum status, but the album itself never rises past Number 40 on the Billboard 200. Vertical Horizon had somehow become one of the most popular bands on the planet while still selling steady like a niche cult act. They were probably the very last band that was able to pull this trick off; Napster changed everything just a few months later.
“There’s no way you know this band” but they would sell two million albums within that year. You’d know this band but would you know anything about them? Could you name a single member of Vertical Horizon then, and can you now? Can you remember a single track on the back half of Everything You Want? Some things aren’t nostalgia bait, and some things aren’t endlessly regurgitated by the machine. Some things were just popular or something like it before they disappeared. It’s okay to have your moment, especially when the moment was so good.
“We Are” was for most people just the track-one-side-one that kicked off one of the many CD purchases of an incredible year for music. There’s no telling how many people were absolutely enraptured by it like I was. Honestly most people probably bought the record for the more sedate hits on it. “You’re a God” is a very different vibe, and not one I appreciated any less, but the sensation of love and loss will always sell to record buyers. “We Are” was for the dreamers, for those who needed soaring melodies to go along with the endless possibilities of a new millennium. The Year 2000 was upon us and we needed guitars that sounded like cities being built from nothing. Years from now–and probably many Winamp Wednesdays from now–I would hear a song that finally put into words that feeling like your mind is a Greyhound station for thoughts. There was a girl I knew who used to say something like it, like her imagination was New York City, full of possibilities and dreams that the luckiest people get to share.
I already spent most of my time in New York City, so I had to dream of other horizons. Getting a bead on what that meant was tricky, but “We Are” sounds like what my imagination did in those wonderful months. Those driving chords and that opening riff sound like building something out of nothing, of being young and in love with the world to the point where every single little victory is a moment to celebrate. “We Are” demands that you wait for the light to come and that you never live your life for somebody else. It’s impossible for a sixteen-year-old to live solely under their own rules: parents, teachers, the other kids you’d die to please hold those pillars so high that you couldn’t touch the ceiling if you tried. But I could still find the light in every single day, living a life that seemed to be big and important even in small and sad days.
It was a new age. Anything was possible.
Vertical Horizon is the soundtrack for a decade that lasted all of twenty months. Their spiritual successors at the end of 2001 were less fun and more dour, even before everything changed: Default, Five for Fighting, The Calling all seemed to be rewriting “You’re a God” without the intricacy. Even Three Doors Down chimed in with “Be Like That”, a year-later follow-up to “Kryptonite” that allowed them to surge ahead of other 2000 bands in the public consciousness. (In that way it worked as the vanguard from the American Pie 2 soundtrack, an echo of the Summer of 1999 that replaced fun with necessity.) Vertical Horizon was spent by the end of 2000, offering up the relationship dirge “Grey Sky Morning” as the last of all possible singles off Everything You Want. That song wouldn’t make a real impact until Gary Allan reworked it as a country ballad in 2005.
There wouldn’t be another Vertical Horizon album for years, and by the time it hit shops even those of us who were crazy for the last one would miss it. The world of 2004 felt forever away from 2000, every few terrifying months comprising their own decades. Maybe it was just the way I was living my life, but four years may as well have been fifty. It was all in my rear-view mirror, too far away to be current but not far enough away to be back in my path as nostalgia.
But now everything seems to belong to a bittersweet sludge known as The Past. Certain years and pinpoint moments are still there with clarity, while other eras of my life have fallen into a bittersweet sludge. “We Are” endures in my library as the sound of creativity, as the hope that some day I’ll get back to being the kind of person who conjures something out of nothing. Until then I can still close my eyes and return to the beginning of this whole 21st century mess, still on top of all the latest music and dead certain that I could create a solution to anything the next millennium threw at me. But I don’t know how and I don’t know where…
NEXT TIME: Love always, Mandy.