DISCLAIMER: These won’t be proper reviews -as if I could write those- or have interesting technical tidbits on them. These are more of a “ah, that song reminds me of…” thing. Like the part you skip on a recipe. So it goes.

Album: Bringing down the horse.

Release date: May 21, 1996.

Track: 3.

Moods: Wistfulness.

If Filter’s Welcome to the fold embodied the “yes, this is almost over!” euphoria I had in late 1999, The Wallflowers’ Bleeders exteriorised that creeping, unnerving feeling of “now what?”

Sure, once you are almost done with higher education, the graduation effect might make you yearn for times’ passed, but uncertainty corrodes you. Just like water on a karstic landscape, you can buckle up and swallow everything around.

I took several bad decisions in early 2000. I felt “time was running out” and managed to mess up a good friendship for something that 80% wasn’t there. The “what if” bug bit me, and I yielded to it.

Mixtapes were passé, I was fully committed to burning mixCDs and I tried to infect everyone I met, included that unnamed friendship, with The Wallflowers. I wanted to push amongst my friends that they had greater stuff on their cd besides One Headlight. And Bleeders was my choice, always.

I hold a lot of regret over stuff I did on the year 2000. I barely recognise the person I was at that moment, and, without justifying, I understand why the things that happened fell through. I was live-blogging, in form of a novella, what was happening back then, and through the years I’ve felt that all three of us were equally to blame. The person with the midlife crisis, the person who didn’t know what they wanted from life, and the insecure person that felt everything slip out of their hands.

We bleed, and perhaps to this day, the scars are barely visible, but ever so present in our souls. We’ll never heal.

-Sam J. Valdés López