Sometimes an album finds you when you need it, not when it needs you.
Failure’s Fantastic Planet was released in August 1996, and by 1997, the band had broken up. Despite critical acclaim and industry love, not enough people opened their wallets to buy the record. I was no different.
In 2001, I had recently graduated from high school. The band I’d been in for more than four years had dissolved, and I was attending community college, mostly because I’d been offered a full scholarship. I went to school two days a week, took only electives, and had no declared major because I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life.
That schedule left me free to work the lunch shift at a local pizza place, delivering pizzas. It was a small operation, so it was usually just me and a cook, whom I’d see in between delivery runs.
One of the cooks was a sloppy looking guy in his twenties. Occasionally, I’d come in to pick up an order, the phone would be ringing, pizzas would be cooking, and the cook would be locked in the tiny worker’s bathroom, barely responsive. So I’d finish making the pizzas, take an order or two, and eventually he’d emerge, groggy, and get back to work. Then I’d head out on another delivery.
He was a nice guy. Intelligent, thoughtful, and a decent person to stand around in a kitchen with, chatting while waiting for pizzas to finish. And though I’d already figured it out, after a few of these encounters, he confirmed that he was an active heroin addict.
When lucid he was open about his fondness for heroin, but he was also painfully aware of the damage his addiction had caused him and the people who loved him. He didn’t sugarcoat any of it. Tales of his mother’s routine of checking him for track marks, his inventive ways to hide them in the places she didn’t know to check or was too uncomfortable with checking.
We also talked about our shared love of music, and when he found out I’d never listened to Failure, he offered to burn me a copy of Fantastic Planet for the low price of five dollars.
I said sure.
A few shifts later, he handed me a blank silver CD with 15 tracks on it. He told me he loved the album because it was “all about heroin,” but assured me I’d like it, too.
On my next delivery run, I popped it in.
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Nothing really grabbed me until “Stuck on You” came on. I recognized it from alternative rock radio and late-night MTV when I was a younger teen. That was enough to make me start the CD over when it finished.
The more I listened, the more I fell in love.
Failure didn’t really sound like anyone else. The sludgy guitars and guitar harmonics, the delayed choruses, the way they could build tension through repetition. It felt different, hypnotic, and completely its own thing.
The more I dug into the album, the more I liked it. And the more I listened, the more I realized that describing it as “all about heroin” was a bit hyperbolic. Or maybe it was just that someone who thinks about heroin all the time starts to see everything through that lens. Don’t get me wrong: there absolutely are songs about heroin on Fantastic Planet, but they’re not the majority. What I came to love was the frankness of the lyrics. They were honest in a way that felt uncommon, unvarnished, and deeply personal.
Those qualities are some of the things I also appreciated in the guy who introduced me to the record.
Driving around delivering pizzas that year gave me plenty of time to think. Mostly about what I didn’t want rather than what I did. What I needed to escape from, things I needed to leave behind and where I might go next.
Failure was a major part of the soundtrack.
I’ll never know what happened to that cook. But I do know that I’ve been listening to Fantastic Planet ever since.
So, after 25 years of listening, 30 years after its release, and on the eve of my 44th birthday, I finally got the chance to see Failure live.
They were — fantastic.
I bought a T-shirt as a way of finally paying for some of the music I hadn’t paid them for back then.
One last thing: Sometime in the 2010s, after streaming services became a thing, I realized you sometimes get what you pay for — — there are actually 17 tracks on Fantastic Planet.
