Fuel’s Bloody Blockbuster Hit ‘Hemorrhage (In My Hands)’ Turns 25

“Memories are just where you laid them” Brett Scallions sings for the opening line of Fuel’s biggest hit “Hemorrhage (In My Hands)”, a song that continued to cement their growing popularity.  There was a lot of pressure to follow up their smash debut, Sunburn when the band reconvened to create their second album, Something Like Human.   

Not many expected the band to do even better than “Shimmer”, they’re outstanding #2 Modern Rock classic that still gets attention to this day, but they did.  Simply about a broken relationship with the first verse from the male point of view and the second verse from the female point of view, Scallions is in the pleading mode of the fallen relationship, trying with one last gasp to win over a loved one to no avail. 

It's usually effective when an act has a catchy chorus, but often, the most revered songs will have multiple catchy sections which is what Fuel have here.  They transition well between the hooky verses and choruses.   When radio sensed this one was a winner, they went all out.  In August 2000, “Hemorrhage” began appearing on the Modern Rock and Mainstream Rock charts.  While it only hit #2 on the Mainstream Rock chart, radio had a serious addiction to the song.  The snail-like pace typical of this chart kept the song in the top 40 for over a year finally dropping off after 56 weeks. 

On the Modern Rock chart, it did even better.  It’s like they played the strongman hammer game in carnivals.  They took their hammer and slammed the lever so hard it sent the puck shooting up, hitting the bell, and then it took 12 weeks to come down.  12 weeks at #1 was one of the best efforts seen by the chart, and it stayed 40 weeks in the top 40, briefly crossing over into the Billboard Hot 100 to climb to #30. 

Guitarist Carl Bell wrote the song and explained the background of it on VH1 Storytellers.  

“This is as deep as it goes, for me. When I was younger, my grandmother got cancer. By the time they found it, it was much too late. Instead of sitting in some hospital, she wanted to go home and be home. And my mother and my aunts and their husbands went to sit with her at home. A few months passed, and the cancer had spread, it had eaten up most of her body and all of her hope, and it was a bad time. One particular day was a really bad day for her. My mother was sitting with her that evening, and she turned to my mom, and said, 'How do you die?' It crushed my mom, and it's still crushing for me.”

The band was so thrilled to be on the joyride to the top and to watch all the songs below unable to reach them, that they waited six months to release another single from their second album.  The next three singles from the album all charted making Something Like Human rocket fuel for new post-grunge bands that were arriving.  The late 1990s had seen a light drop off in post-grunge success so Fuel had room to dominate the genre and keep it warm until acts like Nickelback and Seether deepened the post-grunge well of hits.