First up, it's a damn shame the Deluxe Edition of Rated R isn't as awesome as the ten year anniversary deluxe edition of The Downward Spiral which was remastered beautifully and even mixed into 5.1. This is just the album, mastered a little differently but not sounding any better for it, with a disc of bonus stuff. Nothing special. But, with that out of the way.

Truly great albums change with you over time as you listen to them. Early on when you first listen to it, you think: "Wow! These couple of songs are so rad, totally feel like me right now, but these other songs, I kind of don't get them but they're pretty good too I guess." In the iPod age this means you listen to an album a lot, rate the songs you like, and forget about the others. Luckily Rated R came around pre-iPod era for me, but that doesn't change this effect much.

Then you age and you start looking at the world differently, however differently, happier, sadder, optimistic, or jaded, and different songs come at you and hit you in the chest, and you think: "Wow! I can't believe I didn't used to like these parts of the album, but now they totally feel like me right now!" Well, "Auto Pilot" is one of those songs for me.

Nick Oliveri writing about drug use is not much of a surprise, especially considering pretty much all of Rated R is about drugs, and sex, and sex on drugs, but it's the emotion of this song that really floors me. It's like waking up in a car drunk and not knowing where you are and before you realize where you are you realize first that you miss her (or him) and your head lolls and then you're suddenly back in your life and there's wind in your hair and you briefly contemplate drinking more but there's nothing in the car and people are talking to you but you can't hear them because you just don't care to and when you get home you lie down on the floor for a bit but you think that's melodramatic so you crawl into bed with your pants half off and when you wake up in the morning it's like it never happened but you still make sad eyes at yourself in the mirror but that's just how it's been for at least a couple days now.

That's what this song is like.