In 1994 I started listening to Pisces Iscariot on repeat after a friend told me it was his favorite album. It was such a “different” sound for me, loud and soft, nostalgic and innovative, it didn’t sound like anything else I’d ever heard.

On a dreary Tuesday in October, I skipped school, took a public bus across town, and bought MCIS on the day it was released. It was AMAZING. Who starts off an “alternative” double album with a piano? There were all these feelings that I couldn’t stop listening to. Back then, you didn’t get immediate updates every time a band you liked took a breath. You had to work for it, find magazine articles, read liner notes, listen to those notes they were playing, decipher the lyrics. The book that came with MCIS was so worn from my studying it over and over. I somehow talked my mom into letting me go to a concert at UMASS Amherst to see this enormous tour from a band that was somehow now known all over the world. My band. Billy in the famous “zero” t-shirt. I was surrounded by people who didn’t know the songs that really tore into me like “To Forgive,” but they were there to see my favorite band. After MCIS a lot changed. I met a group of friends from what is now “The Internet.” We goofed off and traveled around different states and even internationally, meeting up to see SP through various tours. We’re now old, some of us with teenage kids of our own, some of whom are second generation fans.