THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Stone Temple Pilots embraced experimentation and open-mindedness to record the band’s third album, 1996’s Tiny Music… Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop. Released on March 26, 1996, the album is a pitch-perfect amalgamation of the band members’ musical personalities, yielding three No. 1 hits — Big Bang Baby, Lady Picture Show and Trippin’ On A Hole In A Paper Heart. For the album’s 25th anniversary, it’s been remastered and expanded with unreleased studio and live recordings.
Scott Weiland, Dean DeLeo, Robert DeLeo and Eric Kretz recorded Tiny Music… at a home studio tucked away in California’s Santa Ynez Valley with Brendan O’Brien, who also produced the band’s two previous albums, Core and Purple. The 25,000-square-foot house became a muse for STP, who recorded in different rooms — from the attic to the garden — and used the expansive space to experiment with new sounds.
Along with a newly remastered version of the original album, this one features 15 unreleased tracks that pull back the curtain on the creative process. Those include early versions of nearly every song on the album with nascent incarnations of Tumble In The Rough, Pop’s Love Suicide and Seven Caged Tigers. The selections also feature an alternate take for Big Bang Baby, and a percussion mix of Trippin’ On A Hole In A Paper Heart. There are also instrumentals for Ride The Cliché and Adhesive, plus the unreleased Kretz’s Acoustic Song. Finally, the set includes a previously unreleased live recording of the band’s March 14, 1997 concert in Panama City Beach, Florida. STP are dialed in from start to finish, delivering blistering takes of songs from the new album (Tumble In The Rough and Big Bang Baby), as well as hits from their earlier records (Vasoline, Plush and Interstate Love Song.)
