Red Hot Chili Peppers Taste the Pain from the 1989 album Mother’s Milk. This is one of those songs I can go back to again and again…Walk away and taste the pain, come again some other day, and really, the whole album is one that I love so much that I’ve bought it repeatedly both as a cassette tape and as a CD over the years, only to have it stolen out of my collection every single time (it’s gone again, sigh).
From the same album, Knock Me Down is another one of those that tunes that just gets to me. It was written by Anthony Kiedis as a tribute to former bandmate Hillel Slovak–Slovak died in ’88 as a result of his drug addiction. Even before I knew that Knock Me Down was a tribute, it was easy for me to recognize and understand the raw emotion in the song; it’s so lonely when you don’t even know yourself.