The song is Plush (Acoustic) by Stone Temple Pilots.

The song, in its original, un-acoustic form, appears on the first Stone Temple Pilots album, Core. During those initial years, STP was just starting to find their footing as a band, just as I was trying to find my footing as a freshman on a major college campus. I’ll bet I listened to that album a thousand times during that excruciating year of my life, just fighting to keep my head above the waters. It’s one of probably a half-dozen albums that I identify as part of my early college experience, in the mid-90s.

It’s an interesting song, when you hear it on the album, and if you know anything at all about the song and its meaning, according to STP front man Scott Weiland, the song is equal parts 1) metaphor for a failed romantic relationship and 2) ballad based on the news story of a kidnapping turned murder. That’s what everybody’s looking for in a hit song, right?!?! Give me a song about a murdered little girl; that’s the stuff I dig.

The song, in its original album version, is kind of catchy, in its own right. But, its upbeat rhythm and guitar-heavy melody didn’t really match up, in my mind, with the lyrics very well at all.

But then, I heard an acoustic version of the song. MTV was responsible for this new exposure, I’m sure, since STP did the song acoustically on MTV Headbangers Ball and also on MTV Unplugged. Between the two versions, I prefer the Headbangers Ball acoustic version to the Unplugged acoustic version –> too much bongo drum in the latter.

When I heard that acoustic version, it changed the entire song for me. Before –on the album– the song was a snappy little ditty, without the emotional gravity that it should have had, given the lyrical topic. But, when Weiland sang the song without all of the other instrumental noise, a little more slowly and soulfully, the song HAUNTED me. I don’t think I’ve listened to the album version of Plush more than a dozen times in the last twenty years, but I can promise you that I’ve listened to the acoustic version of the song at least a couple hundred times over those same years.

The problem with the song, and my love affair with it in its acoustic format, was that the band didn’t initially release the acoustic version on any of their recordings. Thus began the search.

Looking back on it now, I spent way too much money on bootleg CDs from STP concerts from all over the world in the years following the release of Plush, because I was trying to capture the acoustic version on a recording. Back in those days, there was no YouTube for playing your favorite version of your favorite song over and over again. Back at the end of the twentieth century, if you wanted to hear a song repeatedly, you had to have a copy of it. Come to find out, the band wasn’t releasing the song intentionally, and MTV was no help, either. I kept looking for MTV to release a compilation album with the acoustic song on it somewhere, but nothing ever came.

So, for about ten years, I searched for that song, with levels of weakening fervor, as the years went by. I bought this studio album and that bootleg CD, hoping that I was going to finally get a copy of the song. Most of the time, what I ended up getting –at best– was a different version of the same song of which I already had many copies.

Then, in 2003, when STP released their greatest hits album, entitled Thank You, there it was –> Plush (Acoustic). And I’ve been listening to it ever since. The search was over.

* * *

I don’t know if you’ve ever searched for something, but I’ll assume that you have. Now, whether that search led you through a process that took minutes, or years, the desire for the thing that you’re searching for is the original driving force. If I’m looking under the sofa cushions for my car keys, I desire my car keys. If I am looking in the pockets of all of the pants that I have in the dirty clothes pile, that hand-written note that I cannot lose is the driving force.

Sometimes, I find my car keys, while other times, that note goes through the washer and the dryer, and is destroyed.

Searches like these are pretty simple ones, and there are only a couple of possible results –> you find what you seek or you don’t.

And, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had plenty of instances where I’ve been unable to find what I so desperately was seeking, and I’ve stopped the search. That’s the way that it was with Plush (Acoustic). I’d pretty much given up hope of ever finding a recording of that song. Come to find out, according to Wikipedia, there were only a couple of acoustic versions of the song ever released, on a couple of rare and obscure recordings that are still –to this day– rare and obscure.

What sometimes happens when we give up this desperation that burns inside of us to find what is lost, sometimes, is that we come to find it, not through the anxious searching, but more as a result of that sought-after thing just kind of popping up.

The process of giving up the search gets harder, the longer we search, often because of the ‘sunk-cost feeling’ that we have; after we’ve spent time and energy and resources trying to find something, we feel like we have to keep searching because of what we’ve spent trying to find what was lost. But, at the same time, the longer a search goes on, the easier it is to quit, because we run out of the supplies –time and energy and resources– to continue.

I feel like, in many ways, we are all searching, always searching. Whatever you are looking for, I hope that you find it. I hope that your search can finally be over soon.