‘Black’: The Pearl Jam song deemed too emotional to be released as a single
When looking at the very best of Pearl Jam, one would be foolish to look beyond their debut record, Ten, released back in August 1991. Pearl Jam rarely reached the heady heights of their first full-length offering, and it is undoubtedly one of the few albums of the decade that is pretty much perfect from beginning to end, rarely meandering away from the group’s message.
While Pearl Jam are often thrown in with the rest of the Seattle “grunge” crowd, Ten is far more influenced by classic rock, with hard-hitting drums by Dave Krusen and some of the finest guitar solos ever committed to tape by the legendary Mike McCreedy.
After Ten became a commercial success for the band, and certainly for their record label Epic Records, Epic suggested that Pearl Jam re-release one of the album’s tracks ‘Black’ as a single to further capitalise on their ever-growing influence on the popular music charts. However, the band refused their request outright.
The truth is that ‘Black’ is one of the most personal songs that Eddie Vedder ever wrote. It explores the nature of unrequited love that Vedder himself had likely gone through. As such, Vedder felt that ‘Black’ ought to stay in its rightful home, halfway through the album, rather than showing it to too many people via the radio. In Vedder’s mind, ‘Black’ should have remained a song for diehard Pearl Jam fans.
In the Pearl Jam Twenty book, Vedder wrote, “It’s about first relationships. The song is about letting go. It’s very rare for a relationship to withstand the Earth’s gravitational pull and where it’s going to take people, and how they’re going to grow. I’ve heard it said that you can’t really have a true love unless it was a love unrequited. It’s a harsh one, because then your truest one is the one you can’t have forever.”
He’d also stressed that the emotional narrative and weight of the song would be destroyed if it were accompanied by promotional material like a music video. “Some songs just aren’t meant to be played between Hit No. 2 and Hit No. 3. You start doing those things, you’ll crush it,” Vedder decreed to Rolling Stone. “That’s not why we wrote songs. We didn’t write to make hits. But those fragile songs get crushed by the business. I don’t want to be a part of it. I don’t think the band wants to be part of it.”
In fact, Vedder had been so adamant about ‘Black’ remaining solely on Ten that he began to have suspicions about Epic releasing it as a single without his permission and called up several radio stations to ensure they had not. Still, the song charted anyway and is still regarded as one of the band’s best-ever efforts.
Check it out below.
