An Autobiographical Pearl Jam Sampler
Tracing my personal development along to a selection of songs by my favorite band.
This week Pearl Jam released their 12th studio album, Dark Matter. Over the course of the next month, between limited edition vinyl pressings and plane tickets to Portland, where I will see them perform with both of my brothers present (the last time we all saw them together was ten years ago, when they played Austin City Limits. Tiff and I were living there at the time, and they all flew in. The band hasn’t been to Atlanta since Music Midtown 20121), I will likely have spent as much on Pearl Jam as I will have spent feeding and providing for my children.
Which seems insane, and probably is, but this is also a group that has been my favorite band since high school – and frankly, they don’t come to my neck of the woods too often anymore (more on that later). There was a not-inconsiderable period of my life where I wanted to be Eddie Vedder when I grew up. I had a lyric from “Hail, Hail” as my senior yearbook quote (“I don’t wanna think, I wanna feel” – so deep. So tortured!), and I even did my part for sales of Wite-Out by writing snippets of my own poetry or song lyrics next to my signature in my friends’ copies because it seemed like something he would have done.
Rather than torture myself trying to do some kind of ranking of songs/albums or try to craft a summation of their career, I decided to take a different approach to marking the occasion of this new release and look back at some of the songs that have served as sign posts for, or had any sort of major connection to, some of the more significant points of my life and development.
Black (Ten, 1991; MTV Unplugged, 1992; Live from the Fox Theater in Atlanta, 1994)
The pain of a first break-up is all the more visceral because it’s something never felt before – the combination of loss and rejection, so acute the first time it strikes and amplified so strongly by the jumble of hormones assaulting us during our adolescent and teen years, feels not only like it is crushing us in the moment but as if it will never go away. This song, off of the band’s iconic debut album Ten, focuses not on the end of a relationship so much as that seemingly inescapable despair that settles upon you after you’ve lost someone you love. I was vaguely familiar with this song as a radio staple prior to my first ever relationship’s end, but it wasn’t until after that pivotal emotional moment that I realized what it was actually about. At that point, the song became something of an anthem - not only was I not alone in my pain, but someone had expressed exactly what I was feeling in the most direct yet poetic terms. “All the pictures have/all been washed in black” – fucking hell does a line like that strike a chord with a love-sick 15-year-old. But it was the desperate howl of the song’s closing line that really spoke to me and presumably every single person who was dumped at any point from 1991 until the turn of the millennium:
I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life
I know you’ll be a star
In somebody else’s sky
By why, why, why can’t it be
Oh can’t it be mine?
I also trilled to discover that this lyric was pushed even farther in live versions at the time, such as the scorching performance of the song during the band’s MTV Unplugged set or the radio-broadcast version from the Fox Theater in Atlanta in 1994, which includes the addition of the following tag:
I don’t think these people understand
No, they don’t understand
Oh, no one understands
We belong together
Sometimes it doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.
Yellow Ledbetter (B-Side, Jeremy single)
This is the song that would become the canonical implementation of frontman Eddie Vedder’s vocal delivery, described by some as pudding-mouthed but more generously (and accurately!) understood by fans as not just a natural facet of such a lower-register voice but also a means of further obscuring lyrics in order to make them intentionally more indistinct and thus further open to interpretation. A non-album b-side that became one of their most popular songs due to extensive airplay and its placement at the end of the majority of their live sets for the past several decades, any literal meaning in the lyrics to Yellow Ledbetter becomes no more apparent when you actually know what they are, and yet the song has a dream-like quality as it depicts the very specific brand of melancholic dread that comes from seeing someone from a distance who cannot or will not communicate with you – a primal expression of the disconnection that comes from separation and loss.
Most importantly, of course, this was one of the few songs that was ever attempted to be learned and played by Hedgerow, the pathetic excuse for a band that me and a handful of my friends tried to put together during sophomore year of high school. We never fully learned the song2 – among other hurdles, we could never decide who would be the lead singer of our collective – but I did learn the bass part in its entirety.
Dissident/Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town (Vs., 1993)
I often wrote stories based on songs I liked when I was younger, and even wrote an entire feature around my interpretation of Radiohead’s OK Computer. In the case of “Dissident” – a unique song for this group in the fact that it’s high concept and narrative-driven in a way most of their output isn’t – I wrote an entire movie based on just this one track. It was the story of a nurse living in a fascist dictatorship who finds an injured man in the woods and, over the course of nursing him back to health, discovers that he is a political subversive wanted for treason by the state. They form a relationship, and she gets somewhat won over to the cause, all while keeping his presence a secret, until she eventually gives into applied pressure and turns him over to the authorities. He’s executed, and she repents for her betrayal by taking his place at the forefront of the resistance. Powerful stuff. Moving on.
“Elderly Woman” was another radio constant that I largely took for granted until much later. They opened with it at their Austin City Limits appearance in 2014, the first show I attended with the woman who would become my wife, and she fell in love with the song and lent it newfound significance as her way in to a group that was so significant to me. Hearing it again through her ears, at a point where I was moving deeper into my thirties and starting to feel the weight and impact of so much life already lived, also brought a new-found appreciation to a tune that I already found to be so incredibly evocative in its lyrics, expressing as it did the inexorable passage of time, and the experience of not realizing how much of it has gone by until you one day stumble upon someone from your past and are reminded of everything you’ve left behind. Nearly ten years later, when I was writing a feature script for my MFA program at UGA based loosely on the passing of my grandmother, this song became somewhat of an unofficial theme and conceptual guidepost for a process of excavation that proved more difficult than I had anticipated.
Nothingman (Vitalogy, 1994)
Like “Dissident,” this song largely impressed upon me as a result of its cinematic imagery – in particular the line “After he’s flown away / into the sun / Burn, burn, oh burn / Nothingman” - though also contains one of my favorite lyrics they’ve ever written:
She once believed
In every story he had to tell
One day she stiffened
Took the other side
Like almost every other song on this list, it also struck me due to its sense of melancholy and self-loathing. I remember first hearing this on the Live On Two Legs album rather than its original placement on Vitalogy – that feels like it can’t be right, but who am I to argue with an increasingly fallible and porous memory? In any case, Live on Two Legs would also serve as my introduction to the band’s live performances. Such an official recording was something of a rarity at the time for them but would become a key feature of not only their identity but their output from that point forward.
Nothingman was also performed during the first live show I attended, on the same day in 2000 that Alec Guinness became one with the force, at the then-named Phillips Arena in Atlanta. It was played that night as part of the “Trilogy of Man,” a three-song collection – “Better Man,” “Nothingman,” “Leatherman” - loosely connected by the placement of “Man” in their titles. “Leatherman,” an obscure b-side from the Yield era, was rare enough to hear in concert, but all three? The fact that they did this at our show made me think they had a special bond with my city, and in the 24 years since they have come back to Georgia to perform a whopping total of two times3.
I Got Shit (Listed as ‘I Got Id’ on the sleeve of a record titled Merkin Ball, 1995)
The first job that I got on a set after my first round of film school was a mixed experience – I met a lot of people who would become long-time friends and colleagues, but I was also stuck in Gary, Indiana for a month doing a poor job in a sound mixing role that I had somewhat bluffed my way into. While I was befriending the cast and crew in the process, I was also the new guy on a team that had worked together and known each other for quite a while and I came onto the production late – intra-group dynamics had already been formed, and it was on me to figure out where I fit within the pre-existing social structure. It was a situation I would find myself in a lot throughout my life– surrounded by people and yet utterly alone at the same time.
On one of our few nights off, the crew went to Navy Pier in Chicago. We all stood in line to ride the Ferris Wheel, and when it came time to board everyone else in our group piled into one car and thus, after being informed that it was at capacity by the attendant, consigned me to ride alone in the next. One of our group was kind enough to break ranks and join me, which was almost worse for the way it called attention to my shunning. For much of the rest of the evening, I wandered the pier alone, my iPod keeping me company on shuffle. When this song came on, I listened to it a few times so that I could bask in the sense of self-pity that it washed me in.
The b-side to this single, “Long Road,” was the song I most recorded myself playing/singing in college because it was one of their go-to concert openers at the time and I often wanted to pretend as if I was the band coming on stage. Whether that’s more or less pathetic than the above story I will leave to your individual interpretation.
Do the Evolution (Yield, 1998)
I was a freshman in high school when the Yield album came out and was seen as something of a return to form. I was familiar with the band’s back catalog, but this was the first time I remember an album being released and hearing new singles on the radio – starting with “Given to Fly,” which sounded like a step in a completely new direction for a kid who really only knew their first two records and which also contained lyrics that allowed a naïvely religious teenager to convince himself that he was listening to something with a Christian worldview.
I did not come to religion in high school as a result of being raised in the church – we were a Christmas and Easter family, with the occasional trip to Sunday school or a stray service. I came to it, like most things at that point in my life, because of a girl. She invited me to a Bible study group, and I went because it was my in. I had no concept of what devout Christianity really entailed, and so when I showed up to what I thought would be Sunday School with hormones and snacks only to realize that it was more about gnashing our teeth over the fact that we were all sinners in need of salvation by someone whose death 2000 years ago I should somehow feel both guilty and responsible for, to the extent that I should give up any and all things that made life pleasurable, I fell headfirst into the belief system out of nothing less than a natural, almost biological sense of guilt and shame.
Religious belief to me was an extension of my obsessive-compulsive disorder – it’s a quick sideways step from “if you don’t re-check that the oven is off your whole family will die” to “if you don’t apologize for this lustful thought you will be cast into hell for all eternity.” As a result, I spent large portions of my teenage life fearing that if I thought of or indulged in anything even remotely ungodly, I would be sentenced to eternal damnation. One of the acts that I feared would consign me to an unfinished cabana on the shore of the lake of fire was listening to, singing, or even thinking the lyrics or melody to “Do the Evolution,” which aside from title-checking such a heathenous concept contained lyrics such as the following:
I’m a thief
I’m liar
There’s my church,
I sing in the choir
Halleluiah
Halleluiah
If you’re wondering what the big deal is, consider that I also wouldn’t let myself say “the Lord took her away from me” when singing “Last Kiss,” and would skip past “Tremor Christ” and “Satan’s Bed” once I got Vitalogy.
One of the more significant links that this band has had with my life is the degree to which my intellectual and spiritual development has been nudged at times by their influence. It gave me permission to follow internal leads that I was already feeling, and so when I finally cast the weight of self-imposed fundamentalism off of myself and embraced the resultant freedom, this song became a rapturous celebration of embracing everything I had previously denied myself.
Love Boat Captain (Riot Act, 2002)
College was a significant period in my fandom. Binaural came out the year before I graduated high school, was the first album of theirs that I consciously anticipated in advance of purchasing and led to my first-ever show. Riot Act came out two years later - I had settled into college and yet, shockingly, was something of a maladroit within my new university setting. We were in the lead-up to the decades-long war in the Middle East and it still wasn’t a popular position to suggest that perhaps the attack on the World Trade Center was not in fact a justifiable reason to invade sovereign nations. Pearl Jam, still reeling from the tragic deaths of 9 fans at a concert in Roskilde during their last European tour, was blowing up a lot of the cultural cache they had reclaimed from Yield and their return to full-scale touring by taking a firm stance against the war specifically and the Bush administration generally. This was a point at which the legitimate protest of a destructive and unpopular Republican president opened one up to a lot of bad faith opposition, if you can imagine such a thing.
The political anger would be more fine-tuned and sophisticated on their next album, but Riot Act still resonates as a primal expression of resignation in the face of oppressive tragedy, of trying to find a means to continue once you’ve been ground down. It also dovetailed with my own political awakening.
But enough with the heavy stuff. Eddie Vedder shaved his head for this album and so I did too (for my vanity I would be struck bald before thirty and forced to shave my head in perpetuity). The tour in support of this album contained the last show they’d play in Atlanta (with the exception of the aforementioned festival appearance in 2012) until…ever4? They opened that set with this song, a perfect presage of Vedder’s oncoming and specific combination of corniness and profundity, whose lyrics at times point to the fact that this was a band transitioning fully from the unfiltered raw energy of youth to the more considered perspective of middle age.
And the young they can lose hope
’Cause they can’t see beyond today
(The wisdom that the old can’t give away)
Come Back (Pearl Jam, 2006)
[Parting Ways (Binaural, 2000)]
I’ve always found the lamenting “Come Back” a deeply underrated track not just from the self-titled 2006 album but of their catalogue in general. It combines the depth of pain wrought by lost love and heartache that they’ve always been so good at plumbing with a reckoning with mortality that Vedder in particular would start contending with more and more in the coming albums, which makes sense as by this time he had turned 40 and become a parent. The album as a whole, one of their strongest and most consistent, is extremely underrated and so this one never became the mainstay it always felt to me like it could have been.
A confession: I was first listening to and falling for this song in 2006-2007, shortly after its release and around the same time that I was starting to see a girl who was then still in a long-term relationship that would soon end, not entirely but certainly in some part, due to our affair. Whenever I would listen to this song in the early days of our dalliance, I would imagine it from her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend’s perspective. Not to gloat internally, but to take comfort in the fact that for once I was on the victorious end of such an entanglement. I was happy that I didn’t have to feel the way the character at the center of this song felt. Am I proud of that? Not particularly. Did karmic justice strike a year later when I got to gain a new perspective on the earlier album-closer “Parting Ways,” a song about knowing a relationship is going to end but being unable to admit it, as I gradually allowed myself to realize that now she was leaving me for another man? Feels like it!
Just Breathe/The End (Backspacer, 2009)
Backspacer feels like a major turning point for the band – the previously-released Self-Titled/Avocado album feels definitively, twenty years later, like the last stand of their righteous anger period, and after the at-the-time longest gap between records they put out the first album of their Old Man era, a compact affair at 41 minutes that nonetheless may be their post-Avocado highlight. There was a Target exclusive, which also felt like a major shift from an outfit that had been so stringently anti-corporate during their heyday (they willingly took a major hit when they boycotted Ticketmaster in the late 90s and decided for a while to only play venues that were not affiliated with the monopolistic regime). But the album is full of some of their best late-period songs, and it came out right as I was making a huge life change – walking away from a well-paying job that made me miserable to go back to grad school for film production, a decision that in various ways resulted in every good thing that I would get in my life from that point on.
This also marks the point at which Vedder began confronting and writing songs about his own mortality, which felt incredibly sobering at the time. These two tracks offer a stark contrast in approach – “Just Breathe” with its airy guitar melodies and its soaring chorus offering a sense of cosmic balance and continuation in the face of the fact that everything must some day pass, while “The End” closes the record on a note of stark minimalistic fatalism that shook me on first release and to this day leaves me a little winded whenever I hear it. I had recently gotten to a point where I was starting to grapple in a real way with what it would mean to no longer exist, and to have this hit at near the same time felt like a preview of the shift in the way that I would experience and appreciate life and its ultimate fragility, which would feel all the more poignant as I would soon enter an era in which I would meet my wife and begin the journey towards starting a family of my own.
Sirens (Lightning Bolt, 2013)
Which brings me to “Sirens,” which may be the most difficult one to talk about because its ultimate resonance is the freshest. This was always a favorite from Lightning Bolt, which I’ve always had a soft spot for if only for sentimental reasons. Released in October 2013, the CD version of the album was a gift from my eventual wife Tiffany for our first dating anniversary. It was fall, I was developing genuine feelings for someone, and the Tigers were in the playoffs. When I listen to the album I think about standing in the backyard of the house I was living at in Kirkwood feeling the slight chill in the air and knowing that life was good.
If there is any downside to not just falling in love, but forging a bond with someone else that will prove to be the strongest you’ve had, and that will lead to marriage, children, and the unique sense of security that comes from finding one’s soul mate, it is that you become in some of your darker and quieter moments all the more aware of how it can all be taken away from you at a moment’s notice. With the good comes at the very least the potential for a heartbreak that you have been previously unable to fathom.
I didn't care, before you were here
I danced in laughter, with the ever after
But all things change, let this remain
Last June, Tiffany was diagnosed with Stage 1 ovarian cancer when she was 3 months pregnant with our second child. She had surgery to remove the mass and entered chemotherapy almost immediately, because her pregnancy made the timetable even more necessarily immediate. While the prognosis was always good considering the circumstances, we entered a phase of our lives that was incredibly fraught, colored by not only a direct fear of what we were facing but also a very real and visceral reminder of something that we were always dimly aware of conceptually but hadn’t ever had to contend with in a real way: the fact that nothing is permanent and that eventually, in some fashion, it will all come to an end. In times like these I tend to retreat into the things that give me the most comfort, and so this initiated a full-scale re-listen to Pearl Jam’s catalogue among some other time-tested favorites, and it was during this binge that “Sirens,” a song about lying awake in bed and wondering what your life would be like if you were lose the person you love most and who has given your life its meaning, gained newfound relevance.
It's a fragile thing, this life we lead
If I think too much, I can get over-
whelmed by the grace, by which we live our lives
With death over our shoulders
As I was watching the video for the song one night on YouTube, I happened across a commenter who was noting that the song reminded him of his wife, who he had recently lost to cancer, and at that point I had to put it away and stop listening. While we seem to be very much on the other side of the whole ordeal, maintenance drugs and monitoring aside, I haven’t been able to go back to it again. Superstition, trepidation to revisit those feelings as we approach the one-year mark from that diagnosis, I can’t rightly say. Sometimes something resonates so specifically with a particular moment that it feels most appropriate to leave it there, at least for a while, for fear of cheapening it.
Like any art form, music can take the things we’re feeling and give them voice/direct expression. As opposed to other media, though, I tend to grant it more leeway to express these things in a more direct fashion, more plainly. Especially as I’ve gotten older. That can be a comfort, but the value of this particular song during that particular time was actually not that it was comforting – it was that it gave voice to something I was feeling so intensely and made me feel like someone or something out there understood it. When things get bad, you don’t always want someone to say that they will get better - you want someone to say that they get it. So sure, in essence it was doing something that popular music has done ever since its inception, but it was also doing something that this band has done for me for almost my whole life so far throughout its various stages.
-cs
Honorable Mention: Evil Little Goat (Studio Outtake, Ten Sessions, 1990)
I have to throw this one in because it was my oldest child’s introduction to the band, and for better or worse he became instantly obsessed with it and for a few months demanded it be played over and over again. He also started singing it to the goat statue at our local grocery store whenever he would see it. Most impressively, on hearing the opening sample of These Boots Were Made for Walking that opens Ya Ya on the Cowboy Carter album, he recognized the similarity in chord structure and started requested this song again.
Update: They finally came back to Atlanta in May 2025 and played not one two amazing shows!
The only song this group of 16-year-old dudes did ever learn and play in its entirety is, as you’ve certainly already guessed, Fields of Gold by Sting.
See update above
Once again see the previous updates. Also I clearly wasn’t bitter about this at all.