(4/100) Gary Allen, "Best I Ever Had"
There was a lot of trashy country around growing up. A radio station called K-PIG. Some Keith Urban, Gary Allen, the aforementioned Dixie Chicks CDs. Our town is pretty heavily agricultural, and the county has some less affluent areas, so white trash rural culture was more prevalent than you'd expect from California.
This is stuff that even I think is trash. I would consider setting my Spotify history to private if I were to put one of these records on. Still, I always loved "Best I Ever Had." It's got that combination of upbeat and downbeat, happy and sad.
An acquaintance of mine made national news circa 2015 as the "Venmo drug dealer," got busted with tens of thousands of dollars of transactions. He'd written an op-ed in our campus newspaper right after the yearly spring music festival, bragging about how many people had bought his stuff for the concert. That led to the college siccing NYPD on his ass. Anyway, he caught a whiff that they were on to him and started dumping all his inventory; I was able to buy a fat pile of DMT and synthetic H for cheap. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to H-maxx and burn through the entire, massive stash for a few months, see where I landed. I had this sorta sick desire, after seeing so many movie depictions, to see what withdrawals were like.
They were predictably terrible! Couldn't sleep for a week, wasn't happy for a month. Terrible terrible full body restless leg stuff. I started running to try to get dopamine and tire myself out. But I learned a lot. It was wild seeing how deeply chemical my emotions were/are, and how real they felt even when I knew that. At one point I thought I'd ruined my brain forever. "I'll never be happy again" I told a mate, and started tearing up. Really pathetic, a sort of waste of life and time, but I guess that's what being young's for.
Anyway, further down the line I'll write up a few songs that got me through that period, but Gary Allen's "Best I Ever Had" was one of them. Lot of nostalgia there, and the emotional valence was right.
Honorable mention Gary Allen:
And posting a Keith Urban track I remember from being a kiddie. Super saccharine corny stuff.