“Feel The Pain” by Dinosaur Jr.

"Feel the Pain" was the first single from Without a Sound, Dinosaur Jr.'s 1994 album, and it has since settled in as one of the band's best-loved songs. It grew out of a riff frontman J Mascis came up with on the road, on a Jesus and Mary Chain tour of England as he remembers it, riding in a van rather than a bus. He was singing a line about feeling everyone else's pain over the riff when a friend traveling with him supplied the answering half of the thought, and let him keep it.

Mascis wrote and produced it, and handles guitar, keyboards and even the drums himself, leaving the bass to Mike Johnson, whose voice joins his on the record. John Agnello engineered and mixed it. The result is a slacker's shrug of a melody wrapped in guitar that sounds half asleep and wide awake at once, and it's easy to hear why critics have kept praising the guitar work, and the words along with it.

It reached 4 on the US Modern Rock chart and 25 in the UK, with a music video helping spread the word, and it came out on Blanco y Negro and Sire.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.