Control Psycho She Hates Me Puddle Of Mudd

Control Album: Come Clean (2001)
Psycho Album: Famous (2007)
She Hates Me Album: Come Clean (2001)
by Puddle of Mudd

Control is about a very intense love/hate relationship Puddle Of Mudd lead singer Wes Scantlin had with an ex-girlfriend. He couldn't control her and she couldn't control him, which made it very combustible.

"She would do crazy things that would hurt me," he told MTV. "There was no way I could control her, but at the same time the intimate part of the relationship was totally off the hook. I was kind of blind to the whole situation I was in because the sex was so great. Then one day I woke up and just went, 'Man, I can't do this anymore, and you're just not the one for me, so you gotta go. Bye-bye.'"

A line you're likely to remember from Control is "I love the way you smack my ass." Wes Scantlin spent a lot of time with strippers and had a girlfriend who worked at a Kansas City club called Bazooka's Showgirls. She would tell her customers, "I love the way you smack my ass," which was kind of her catch phrase, so Scantlin put it into the song.

"Control" was Puddle Of Mudd's first single. It was released on Fred Durst's label, Flawless Records.

The band was broken up in 1999 when Wes Scantlin threw a proverbial Hail Mary by sneaking backstage at Limp Bizkit's Kansas City tour stop and delivering a demo tape to Durst's bodyguard. Scantlin was in the process of relocating to New Orleans when he got word that Durst was interested. Unfortunately, his bandmates were frozen out of the deal, so Flawless Records teamed Scantlin with new musicians who became Puddle Of Mudd.

Scantlin wrote Control with Brad Stewart, who later joined the bands Shinedown and Saliva. Stewart was brought in to a songwriting session with the band, which included Paul Phillips on guitar and Doug Ardito on bass. Scantlin played them a song he'd been working on called "Hate Sex," and asked for help completing it. That's when Stewart started playing the riff, which changed the song.

"It happened pretty quick," Scantlin said. "'Control' used to be called 'Hate Sex,' and then Brad gave it a different rhythm and he just started playing it on bass."

Fred Durst directed the music video, which starts with Scantlin's girlfriend kicking him out of her truck, leaving him to walk to his next gig. Music video tradition would have that gig packed with adoring fans in awe of the mesmerizing stage show, but Durst took a different approach, showing Puddle Of Mudd playing in a bar to about 20 people, most of them hanging out at the bar or playing pool. This was much closer to Scantlin's reality: he played to many sparse crowds throughout the '90s as he was trying to climb the ladder.

Durst wrote the treatment but Scantlin says he really was kicked out of a girlfriend's car and had to walk to a gig.

In a case of life imitating art, Scantlin was arrested in March 2002 after fighting with his fiancée, Michelle Rubin on the side of a highway, echoing a scene in the video for "Control" that shows him arguing with a girl by the side of a road and never quite making up. Charges were not filed.

Do crazy people know they're crazy? The singer in Psycho is wondering if he's a little nuts. While insanity can be a serious topic, this is a fun song that is known for its campy video that pays homage to many famous horror flicks, including Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Poltergeist and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Lead singer Wes Scantlin is driving a car full of teenagers when they encounter a series of classic horror characters. Several celebrities are also incorporated: Kid Rock, Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, and Kanye West look-a-likes appear in the video.

Psycho reached #1 on the Mainstream Rock chart. It was also Puddle of Mudd's first entry in the Hot 100 since "Away From Me " in 1993.

Howard Benson (My Chemical Romance, Daughtry, Seether) produced this rocker.

The noted session musician Kenny Aronoff played drums on Psycho, as he did for their previous single, "Famous." Among the other artists Aronoff has recorded with include The Rolling Stones, Meat Loaf, Bob Seger, Elton John, Rod Stewart and Avril Lavigne.

"Puddle Of Mudd" can do metaphor. They did it in their hit "Blurry," where lead singer Wes Scantlin sings about his life going out of focus. But "She Hates Me" is far more straightforward and not the least bit figurative. This girl really does f--king hate him.

She Hates Me has a comic tilt but was inspired by a real relationship. The woman in question is the mother to Scantlin's son, Jordan (they never married). He told the story in an interview with Alabama Life. "I came home really late," he said. "She was furious, and she wouldn't let me sleep in the bed. She made me sleep in the corner on the carpet and I had no pillow. I had a little notebook, and I grabbed a little pencil and I just started writing, 'She f--king hates me. She f--king hates me.' She was always talking about, 'Sex isn't everything in a relationship.' And I was like, 'Alright. But I'm home and feeling frisky so let's get down.' She was like, 'Nope, you're not getting nothing," and that's how that went."

Wes Scantlin wrote this song with Jimmy Allen, the original guitarist in Puddle Of Mudd. Allen - along with every other member from the '90s except Scantlin - wasn't in the band when it was released. By the time Fred Durst heard the band's demo tape and decided to sign them to his Flawless Records label, the band had broken up. He got in touch with Scantlin and they struck a deal with the label setting him up with new bandmates.

The original Puddle Of Mudd is from Kansas City; the new lineup came from all over and assembled in Los Angeles to make the Come Clean album (a session drummer was used because they couldn't find a permanent one right away). Allen did get a songwriting credit on "She Hates Me" and also on "Blurry" and "Drift And Die."

"Blurry" was the big hit from the Come Clean album, released as the second single, following "Control." "Drift And Die" was the next single, but "She Hates Me" had already found an audience, particularly among radio DJs who loved to play it. By the time it was released as a single, many had already heard the song. It quickly became a highlight at Puddle Of Mudd's concerts, where the crowd would join in the chorus.

"She Hates Me" didn't reach its chart peak until December 2002, 16 months after the album was released. The band spent most of that year on the road so they didn't get another album out until late 2003. By then their grungy nu-metal sound had fallen out of favor and they managed just a few more minor hits.

An unexpected influence on this song is "Summer Nights" from the musical Grease. Listen to both songs and you'll hear the melodic similarities. This lilting groove takes the edge off the lyric to make the song more fun than angry.

ASCAP certified this as one of the most-played songs of 2002. It somehow appealed to both the women who could relate to the furious feelings toward a guy, and to the many men who have had a once-affectionate girlfriend turn quite bitter.

This song makes an unflattering appearance in the 2018 episode of The Good Place, "Leap to Faith," where it is played as an instrument of torture in "the bad place" along with "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer."

Apparently, Wes Scantlin doesn't watch the show and didn't have to give his authorization. Asked about it in a 2022 interview, he said, "I didn't know anything about that until just now."

In the video, guys undergoing various degrees of tedium have catharses when the chorus hits. There's also a girl in the video who yells into her phone and rocks out in her bedroom. That's Minka Kelly in one of her first screen appearances. She went on to date Derek Jeter, star in Friday Night Lights, and be named Sexiest Woman Alive by Esquire.

The video was directed by Marc Webb, who cast Kelly in the first movie he directed: 500 Days of Summer. Webb later directed The Amazing Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man 2.