Pearl Jam fans made ‘Alive’ their own and used it to heal Eddie Vedder
Pearl Jam is living proof of the idea that a musician must part ways with a song once it leaves the studio, for no matter how personal the lyrical content is, it belongs to the fans thereafter.
Their 1991 song ‘Alive’ is perhaps one of the most detailed and personal in all of rock. Despite music’s unending ability to be universal no matter the costs, Eddie Vedder wrote something that tried to buck the trend, focusing on a story of his own upbringing that isn’t personal, but intensely unique.
“The original story being told in the song is of a young man being made aware of some shocking truths,” the frontman explained, “And one was that the guy he believed to be his father while growing up was not, and number two was that his real father had passed away a few years before. As if adolescence wasn’t tough enough…”
It didn’t take critics long to figure out that Vedder himself was the man in question. It was a crippling realisation that came to him in the early years of his life, long before he could write a song about it. He had to deal with it then, like anything else in the real world, and it wasn’t much later, until Pearl Jam formed in the heady American grunge scene, that this painful story could be addressed through song.
It’s all there in the verses, most notably the first verse that sees Vedder adopt the position of his mother, singing, “Son, she said, ‘have I got a little story for you / What you thought was your daddy was nothing but a… / While you were sitting home alone at age 13 / Your real daddy was dyin’ / Sorry you didn’t see him, but I’m glad we talked’”.
Then comes the vocal hook in the chorus, which feels oddly liberated in comparison to the heaviness of the verse and sees Vedder take on a more primal and frustrated position in his voice, to sing the line that forces him to accept his life. He explained, “Fine, the dad’s dead, but I’m still alive, and I’ve gotta deal with this. So it was a curse”.
But fans took the vocal line and ran with it, leaving the tragedy of the verse long behind. No longer was Vedder’s chorus signalling the brutal resignation of accepting life will never be the same, but instead looking forward to the beauty of being alive despite it all and using that as a switched perspective to turn the song into an anthem of defiance.
“Folks are jumping up in the aisles, using their bodies to express themselves and singing along ‘I’m still alive’ en masse,” Vedder said, concluding, “And here’s the thing. When they changed the meaning of those words, they lifted the curse.”
It’s another inspiring example of how music does, in fact, belong to the fans, not in a complete trade-off, robbing Vedder of his own relationship with the song, instead healing him and allowing ‘Alive’ to become the song it was always destined to be.
He didn’t know it when writing, for it was a simple exercise in personal therapy, but it was always meant to be a song of healing.
