“Running Blind” by Godsmack

"Running Blind" led off The Other Side, the acoustic EP Godsmack put out in 2004, and it catches the band with the amps unplugged and the guard down. Frontman Sully Erna wrote and produced it, but the song goes back further, to the long grind of touring behind their second album, Awake. By Erna's own telling, the band had been on the road for about three and a half years by then, far from home and family, and between the booze, the drugs and the hungover arguments they had drifted badly apart.

You can hear that fatigue in it: brooding acoustic strumming, a heavy-lidded pace, and Erna's voice sounding worn rather than wrathful. Playing it at an acoustic show in London in 2012, he called it one of his favorite Godsmack songs.

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