Recording the follow-up to a smash but can be nerve-wracking. Some turn to wine, others retreat. Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon found a '64 Ford Galaxie. The band's aptly named single, "Galaxie," debuts at No. 25 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart.

        "I'm an old-car fanatic," says Hoon, calling from his home in Lafayette, Ind. "It was a Matchbox fetish that turned real. But I don't smash my new cars the way I did with Hot Wheels. I have seven [cars] now. I just love them; they're like old pieces of time. The gadgets and the dashboards, and everything is so inefficient. There so gaudy and big and you can get your whole block in your car.

        "I have an old farmer who lets me store them in his barn, and I just bring them in town, fuel them up, lube them up, bring them right back out there, and enjoy the little life I have in the drive from the farm into town."
 

        It was a white, '64 Ford Galaxie (69,000 miles; $2,000), picked up while recording Blind Melon's new record, "Soup," in New Orleans, that was immortalized in song.

        ["The car] was just my escape, my comfort zone from a lot of places that I found myself during my stay down there-I think a lot of people probably think that [in the song] I'm talking about the galaxies, as in the universe. And I've always liked the idea of wordplay and ambiguously writing about something so simple and making it sound so far out."
Hoon bought the old Ford, as well as lots of other local odds and ends, in search of "anything that I could get that carried the vibe of New Orleans. That was a testing time, I think, for all of us in a lot of ways. Making the new record and trying to alleviate the pressure of following up the first record, which surprised us. And I think that being in an environment where your willpower is definitely tested--some night prevailing, some nights not--you were posed with a lot of different questions and scenarios. We were like, 'OK, here we go. Now, were we just lucky, or do we really know how to put together a record that is a record, as opposed to making a record with singles on it?' Whatever played a part in [that experience], I had to take home with me."