Big Empty

In this song, lead singer Scott Weiland lays out a series of images that form a vague story involving a car, a cigarette and a conversation. In our interview with Weiland, he explained that many of his lyrics are put together from various images that come to mind, and it's up to the listener to piece them together. In this song, the key line is "conversations kill" - the idea that a discussion with a loved one can quickly lead to ruin. When pressed about the meanings behind these lyrically obtuse tracks, Weiland would sometimes pass them off as superficial. He once said "Big Empty" was "About f--king in the back seat of your car."

Stone Temple Pilots wrote this song for the 1994 supernatural action movie The Crow, and it first appeared on the soundtrack (they liked the song enough to later include it on their own album, Purple). The song was originally titled "Only Dying," but when the star of the movie, Brandon Lee, was accidentally killed during filming, they changed the title out of respect for the actor. "Big Empty" won an MTV Movie Award for Best Song from a Movie.

According to the album liner notes, while the bulk of Purple was recorded in March 1994 (coincidentally the month before Kurt Cobain killed himself), this song was recorded nearly a year earlier on May 25, 1993. The band played the song live when they appeared on MTV Unplugged in November 1993.