Creative Conscience: The Pearl Jam album Eddie Vedder can no longer listen to
There’s always a certain degree of separation between an artist and their music. As much as you might think that a track sounds great in your head, there comes a point in the mixing process where even the greatest song of all time starts to sound like white noise after a while. Even though artists usually come around on pieces that they think stand the test of time, Eddie Vedder has made it a point not to return to Pearl Jam’s landmark debut, Ten.
Then again, there’s probably a reason why Vedder doesn’t want to revisit those works… because he hasn’t stopped playing them since 1991. From the first time the band started playing shows, songs like ‘Even Flow’ and ‘Alive’ have rarely left their setlist, with every Pearl Jam fan on Earth being able to recognise the guitar riffs and Vedder’s distinct yarl before the first line is finished.
When Vedder first started with the group, that was the exact opposite of what he wanted. After playing in different bands throughout San Diego, Vedder found himself in Seattle just by happenstance, only moving there because of how much the music moved him when he got ahold of Stone Gossard’s demo.
Instead of the usual rockstar approach of wanting to sell millions of albums, Vedder wanted the band to have a gradual ascent in the vein of artists like REM. He didn’t really have a say in the matter, though, with producer Rick Parasher putting reverb on everything and making the group sound like an arena rock act before they had graduated from the bar band circuit.
Since it was released concurrently with Nirvana’s Nevermind, fans and press outlets quickly picked up on Pearl Jam as the next coming of rock and roll, and Vedder was pissed. Considering how much he had put into his songs, Vedder didn’t like seeing his musical children being treated like the next big thing in music, thinking that most of the tracks were far too personal to be that mainstream.
When speaking to Rolling Stone years later, Vedder still had a problem looking back on Ten, saying, “I can listen to the early records [except] the first record, which is strange because it’s the one that, in a way, we’ve been defined by, or people know those songs most. But it’s just the sound of the record. It was kind of mixed in a way that was… it was kind of produced.”
For Vedder, this wasn’t just another mainstream rock record. If anything, songs like ‘Jeremy’ and ‘Black’ were supposed to be in the vein of artistic rockers like Jane’s Addiction before they started to become anthems, leading to Vedder having to disassociate from his most personal lyrics now that everyone was asking him about what they meant.
If the first album was overproduced, they wouldn’t be making that mistake again, going into the studio to record their sophomore effort, Vs., and getting a much heavier result because of how dry the mix was. Despite the sound being far too slick for what Pearl Jam wanted, that hasn’t stopped most of Ten’s track listing from working wonders whenever they played in massive stadiums worldwide.
