When the Dallas Cowboys asked Scott Stapp what number he wanted on his jersey, he only had one thing in mind.
It had to be 11.
"That was my number when I played football all the way up through Junior High," he told Kyle Brandt on his show 10 Questions. "And also, there was a little ego behind that number, because it’s double number ones. We were coming off a streak of number ones, so I’m going to own that number. That’s the truth behind the 25-year-old-ego at the time."
It's understandable why that ego was running wild, though, considering the position that Creed found themselves in as Thanksgiving of 2001 fast approached. Having just debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 with their third full-length Weathered, swiftly following the same treatment that 1999's Human Clay had received, there was reason to celebrate. Plus, being asked to play the halftime show for the team he had followed throughout his life - as well as come to practice, meet the players and staff and play a part in one of the landmark games of the season - you would be amiss in allowing him the chance to revel in things a touch.
Yet in the context of life outside of rock music, things had certainly played out a little bit differently than he may have expected them to. The reverberations of the events of September 11 were still being felt in abundance, with the intent of Thanksgiving taking on an even more sentimental feeling than it already had. And when it came to how people would make sense of Weathered as a collection of songs, most notably in the chart-bothering singles My Sacrifice and One Last Breath, Scott realised that their music was taking on a completely different weight. One that they never intended to, but knew they had to work with.
"I definitely think it’s gonna affect perception on some of these songs,” he said in 2001. “Some of them may even seem like they were written because of that, and that’s what kinda freaked Mark and I out."
Internally, Weathered was the perfect way to describe what the then-trio were doing with each other. Things were splintering. Issues both inside and outside the band had tested them to their limits, but the result was resilient songs. Songs about how when you are dealing with life's hardships, you sometimes have to soldier on even if it doesn't feel like you're going anywhere. To then have the weight of national tragedy placed on top of those meanings is enough to send any group a bit west. But what can you do when you've created something so honest?
It was not something that we planned or thought of ahead of time; it just came out," Scott added, telling Spin in 2024. "And that’s how we always wrote as a band. I know that sounds cliché: to be “honest and authentic in your songwriting,” but that’s exactly what we were."
