In my digging, whether vinyl or cd, I like to find things I hadn’t seen before and this was one of those items. It was a Limited Edition CD Single from Creed for their song “With Arms Wide Open”. The release was to help promote and fund the With Arms Wide Open Foundation that was started by the band. $3 from the sale of each single went to the Foundation.

The CD has 3 separate versions of the song. It has the Strings Version, the Acoustic Version and the Rock Version. There is also a video of the song as well. So if you like the song, you get a nice variety of versions for the song and that usually makes every collector happy. I will be honest, vocally each version of this song is feel exactly the same. The only difference is they layered in strings for the String Version and acoustic guitars for the Acoustic Version. The Rock Version has all instruments at full force but is around seconds shorter.

What I loved about the CD single is the fact it was transparent. Yes, you get a picture disc as well with the crossed hands of the father and child, but you can see right through the disc. I don’t think I’ve seen one like that before so I had to grab it. And I do like Scott Stapp so there was that as well.

Now, everyone knows the song, good or bad. The song was inspired when Scott Stapp found out his wife was pregnant and during the soundcheck that day, he wrote the song in around 15 minutes. Mark Tremonti was playing something and when Scott heard it he loved it and ran over they started putting the song together. Now, the funny thing is he originally wrote the song for assuming it was a daughter, but it was a son. His son Jagger.

The song is power ballad and man, did it get overplayed. So much so that Scott said his wife would even turn the channel if the song came on. But it was a huge cross-over hit for the band and the funny thing is when people heard this song and went and bought ‘Human Clay’, they were in for a real surprise because the rest of that album was pretty metal and didn’t always have the smooth vocals of Stapp. At least, I know I was surprised. Love the song or hate it, it gave the band a future and a lot of money!

And you might hate them, but this video does have over 150 Million views. So someone out there likes them. Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend.