| Biography
Staind is a four-piece alternative metal group from Springfield, Massachusetts. Over the past five years, the band has had a large impact on rock and mainstream radio with a large number of successful singles spanning several albums and has gone on to redefine how the genre is received in the public eye.
After meeting through friends and covering KoRn, Rage Against the Machine, Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains, among others, in smalltime clubs for two years, Staind self-released their debut album, Tormented, in November 1996. The album is generally regarded as the band's heaviest and "rawest" effort. Until recently, the album was difficult to obtain, as only four thousand copies were originally sold. Since then, the demand from fans has allowed it to be released through the band's official website.
 The band's big break came after lead singer Aaron Lewis befriended Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst after opening for the band in October 1997 in Hartford, Connecticut at the Webster Theater. At first, Durst disagreed with Staind's choice of cover art for Tormented, which depicted a stabbed Bible, a crucified Barbie doll, and the words 'There's nothing left for me' scrawled in blood across the wall, and refused to sign them on the argument that they were Satan worshipers. However, after hearing them out, Durst was so impressed he signed them to his Flip record label, and co-produced their 1999 breakthrough Dysfunction with Terry Date. To this day, Dysfunction has sold over two million copies in the U.S. alone. The album was given mediocre reviews by critics for being "indicative of the times", but a large number of the band's fans nonetheless regard it as the group's best work. The nine-track nu-metal LP (with one hidden track, "Excess Baggage") produced three singles, all of which enjoyed radio play. The most well-known, "Mudshovel," (which also appeared on Tormented, spelled as "Mudshuvel"), has since become a staple of the band's live show. Staind toured with Limp Bizkit for the Family Values Tour during the fall of 1999, where Aaron Lewis performed their first mainstream hit "Outside" (a song he was working on at the time but had not yet finished—he finished it on the fly while performing) with Fred Durst to hundreds of waving cigarette lighters, and which set them up for their smash hit 2001 album Break the Cycle, which brought them international success (it went number 1 in both the U.S. and the UK), sold more than 7 million copies, and had first week sales of over 700 000 in the U.S. alone.
(Source: wikipedia, www.wikipedia.com)
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