Just Go

Album: Dysfunction (1999)
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Songfacts®:

  • Staind lead singer Aaron Lewis reveals his insecurities on "Just Go," an early track from the band. It's pretty intense:

    Such a cancer on the face of everything that's beautiful
    I wish that this would just go


    Around this time, Lewis was using music as therapy, dealing with all his pent-up traumas that were very real. Many fans connected with these songs as well; mental health wasn't openly discussed much back then and there was some comfort in knowing that others were struggling as well.

    It's worth noting that Lewis was plumbing the depths of his despair in this song, but he was making positive changes in his life and going through a period of personal growth. Lewis got married in 1998 and became a dedicated family man with a love of nature and a healthy outlook.
  • "Just Go" was Staind's first single, first released in early 1999 as a double-A side along with "Suffocate," and then put out as a standalone single after the Dysfunction album was released later that year.

    The band put out an album on their own in 1996 called Tormented that they sold at shows, but Dysfunction was their first on a major label, Flip Records. Flip was also home to Limp Bizkit, whose frontman Fred Durst helped get them the deal and also co-produced the album. Durst saw Staind perform when they were Limp Bizkit's opening act at a 1997 show in Hartford, Connecticut. Impressed, he mentored them, bringing them to Jacksonville to work on the album and touring with them after it was released. Dysfunction went on to sell over 2 million copies in America, but Staind's next album, Break The Cycle was a lot bigger, moving 5 million.
  • Fred Durst directed the video, which cuts between shots of the band performing a woman coming unhinged. At the end of the video, she jumps off her balcony but lands in a swimming pool. After the song ends, we see Durst in some behind-the-scenes footage as he helps the actress out of the pool.

Comments: 1

  • Luna Loud from Royal Woods, MichiganAaron plays rhythm guitar on more recent live versions of this song. I think the bridge tells that it's a back and forth cycle of abuse between the narrator and the other person, and the "needle in your spoon", obviously an allusion to heroin, is also a metaphor for how they feed the narrator the "poison" and he "feeds it", i.e., hurts other people with it.
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