I recently and finally bought the Mad Season CD Above after many years (5? 6?) of appreciating the single "Long Gone Day" but not having heard it since the year I first heard it. I popped it in my girlfriends car CD player and turned it to that track. It was still as enticing and exciting as the first time I'd heard it. The prospect of the other songs was also on my mind, greatness was bound to be hidden in them.Anyway, this post really isn't about Mad Season or "Long Gone Day." It's more about the eerie feeling I get when I listen to a dead man sing. Don't get me wrong, Layne Staley has a beautiful voice, in fact, one of the most beautiful voices the grunge era ever produced. But I can't shake thinking about how he isn't even a part of this world anymore. And on my drive home tonight listening to them, I was thinking pretty heavily on the fact that he isn't really dead. He's still selling albums, even in small town record stores. He's still got something to sing about and a depressing story to tell. Layne Staley never left the music world. Neither did Kurt Cobain or John Saunders (Mad Season bassist who also overdosed). And it isn't just grunge artists who are gone but never truly gone. Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon. Hell, I guess you can throw Elvis into the mix, though I'm not a big Elvis fan myself. More recently James Brown and Johnny Cash. No, all of these talented musicians never really left. They stopped contributing new music, but our ears don't keep us from trying to listen to the same piece of music differently every time. They have proven themselves timeless. Some might say that it was the fans that kept their music in the limelight, but it really just comes down to the music itself. Their music is something completely different. They set the trends and influenced the next generation in ways the bands today can't even dream of. Panic! at the Disco has no timeless quality that will influence the bands of tomorrow. There's just no comparison. And for them to even have a box set, that's just ridiculous.The most important thing to realize is that we can't even imagine the greatness these bands and artists would have gone on to create. But would you really want Kurt Cobain and Nirvana alive now playing shows with Panic! at the Disco? Would you want Layne Staley and Alice in Chains making music with Korn? Their music and their creativity surpassed most of the bands of today and I wouldn't even want Kurt and Layne to have their ears devirginized by the likes of Plain White T's and Fall Out Boy. I wouldn't want the general populace to purchase every Panic! CD but leave the new Nirvana CD untouched. I wouldn't want to see these artists dealing with that. The fact they died on their own terms (exception being Lennon) doesn't even seem like a selfish act to me. Normally I would blame someone who died of an overdose for their own death. In the case of these artists, however, I would probably blame the world they were trying to escape from. But all in all, we have to remember they aren't physically with us anymore, but they will always be audibly present and that's comforting.