Pearl Jam announce 25th anniversary edition of ‘Yield’
Pearl Jam have announced that they will be reissuing their 1998 album, Yield. Upon its original release, the grunge icons got hits like ‘Given to Fly’ and ‘Do the Evolution’ on the radio, the latter of which marked their first official video since ‘Jeremy’ in 1991.
When originally working on the album, guitarist Stone Gossard remarked that the recording process was more easygoing, telling Billboard, “Being able to pull back from all that pressure helped give us the space to figure out our internal problems, within the band and within us as individuals. We gave each other some time off from each other. Actually, it’s like we broke up but still made records”.
‘Given To Fly’ brought a certain amount of levity to the group at the time, being one of the first songs with music written by guitarist Mike McCready. When asked about it later, McCready told Guitar World about the privilege of hearing Eddie Vedder sing his words, saying, “That was enough. I did have the intention of making a dynamic song with a sense of flow. I built it like a wave on the ocean. It starts out slow and small, then builds until it gets really large, then breaks like a wave and gets small again”.
Also included with the album is the concert film ‘Given Way’, which features the band playing in Melbourne, Australia. This performance marks one of the final times the band would play before Soundgarden’s Matt Cameron replaced drummer Jack Irons.
While the performance includes most of the hits from Yield, there is also ‘I Got ID’, which was part of a collaboration the band made with Neil Young a few years prior.
When looking back on that time, Vedder remembers dropping the jaded angle, saying (via Loudwire), “We’re not the same people we were five years ago. There’s ‘cool’ and ‘cynical,’ which to me is dull and boring. It’s a perfect way to get to youth, you know, being sarcastic and saying everything sucks. But at this point, I’d have to fake it to do that.”
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