Plush by Stone Temple Pilots reached number one on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart in 1993 and won the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance with Vocal the following year.
Written by vocalist Scott Weiland and guitarist Dean DeLeo, it appeared on the band’s debut album Core and helped establish Stone Temple Pilots as a commercial force in the grunge era.
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| Song | Plush |
| Artist | Stone Temple Pilots |
| Album | Core (1992) |
| Written by | Scott Weiland, Dean DeLeo, Robert DeLeo, Eric Kretz |
| Produced by | Brendan O’Brien |
| Released | 1993 |
| Genre | Grunge, Alternative Rock |
| Chart Peak | #1 Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks, #23 US Billboard Hot 100 |
Table of Contents
Background and History
Stone Temple Pilots formed in San Diego, California in 1989, built around vocalist Scott Weiland, guitarist Dean DeLeo, bassist Robert DeLeo, and drummer Eric Kretz.
The band signed to Atlantic Records and recorded their debut with producer Brendan O’Brien, who had also worked with Pearl Jam and would become one of the defining producers of the grunge era.
Core was released in September 1992 and initially drew heavy criticism from rock press who accused the band of imitating the Seattle sound without genuinely belonging to it.
Despite those reviews, Core performed strongly on rock radio and steadily built an audience through consistent touring and a series of singles.
Plush was released as a single in 1993, the third track from Core to receive radio promotion, and became the song that broke the band commercially at the national level.
The Recording Story
This song differs structurally from most grunge recordings of its era, opening with an acoustic guitar and a restrained vocal before expanding into the full-band electric arrangement.
Scott Weiland’s vocal on the track is more melodic and controlled than his performances on the harder songs from Core, demonstrating a range that the band’s critics had not credited them with.
Brendan O’Brien’s production gives the acoustic sections genuine warmth before allowing the electric guitar to take over the chorus without overwhelming the vocal.
Dean DeLeo wrote the guitar part, and the combination of his melodic instinct with Weiland’s lyrical approach produced a track that connected to a broader rock audience than the band’s heavier material could reach alone.
The song shares the quiet-to-loud dynamic that Nirvana had made central to alternative rock, while applying it to a more explicitly melodic arrangement than most grunge bands would attempt.
The result placed it in a category closer to the post-grunge sound that would define rock radio for the rest of the decade than to the harder edge of contemporaries like Alice in Chains.
The Grammy Win
This classic song won the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance with Vocal at the 1994 ceremony, competing against material from bands who had been operating at the commercial level far longer than Stone Temple Pilots.
The win was significant because it came from a band that the rock press had spent most of 1992 dismissing as derivative.
The Grammy recognition validated Stone Temple Pilots as a genuine commercial force rather than a regional act riding the grunge wave.
Scott Weiland’s acceptance represented a turning point in how the band was perceived by the industry, if not immediately by critics who continued to question their originality.
The award also reflected the commercial reality on how this song had connected with rock listeners in a way that purely critical opinion could not explain away.
Plush and the Charts
It reached number one on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and peaked at number twenty-three on the Billboard Hot 100.
The chart performance drove Core to certified eight times platinum in the United States, making it one of the best-selling debut albums of the grunge era.
The album reached similar certification levels in several other markets, establishing the band internationally at a pace their critics had not anticipated.
It was the highest-charting of the four singles released from Core, outperforming “Sex Type Thing,” “Wicked Garden,” and “Creep” on the pop chart.
Its success positioned Stone Temple Pilots alongside Soundgarden as one of the non-Seattle bands that had fully crossed from alternative rock into mainstream commercial success by mid-1993.
Lasting Legacy
Plush remains the Stone Temple Pilots song most associated with the band’s commercial peak and the track that best demonstrates Scott Weiland’s melodic range against the band’s harder guitar background.
The acoustic-to-electric structure of the song influenced how post-grunge bands approached ballad-adjacent material throughout the rest of the 1990s.
Weiland’s death in December 2015 returned attention to the Core era recordings, and Plush was consistently cited as the performance that most fully captured what made him a distinctive vocalist in the grunge landscape.
Stone Temple Pilots continued recording and touring after Weiland’s departure, eventually with new vocalist Jeff Gutt, but that song remained a constant in their live sets regardless of lineup changes.
The Grammy win, the chart performance, and the sustained radio presence across three decades place Plush firmly among the defining rock singles of the early 1990s alternative era.
Watch the Official Video
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQ
- Who wrote Plush?
- All four members of Stone Temple Pilots are credited as co-writers. Dean DeLeo wrote the guitar part, and Scott Weiland contributed the lyrics and melody. The writing credit reflects the collaborative arrangement that defined the band’s songwriting process on Core.
- What album is this song from?
- The song appears on Core, Stone Temple Pilots’ debut album, produced by Brendan O’Brien and released in September 1992. The album was certified eight times platinum in the United States and became one of the best-selling debut albums of the grunge era.
- Did it win a Grammy?
- Yes. The song won the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance with Vocal at the 1994 ceremony, a recognition that came despite the rock press having spent much of 1992 questioning the band’s originality and their place within the grunge movement.
- Why did critics dismiss Stone Temple Pilots early on?
- Many reviewers accused the band of imitating the Seattle grunge sound without genuinely belonging to the Pacific Northwest scene that produced Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. The commercial success of Core and the Grammy for Plush forced a reassessment of that position.
- Is Scott Weiland still with Stone Temple Pilots?
- No. Weiland parted from the band in 2013 after years of tension related to his personal struggles, and he died in December 2015. Stone Temple Pilots continued with Jeff Gutt as vocalist but Plush remains most closely associated with the Weiland-era recordings.
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Dismissed as derivative on release and then awarded a Grammy less than two years later, Plush stands as the Stone Temple Pilots recording that settled the argument about whether the band belonged in the conversation with the era’s best, and the song that proved Scott Weiland’s range extended well beyond the harder material that had first drawn attention to the group.