The odd Pearl Jam song Mike McCready thought was “the best we had ever done”
Not every band wants to be as big as their fans think they should be. Despite the many people who enjoy their music and whose lives were changed by hearing one of their songs, the immense pressure of playing to massive crowds every night can become overwhelming. By the time Pearl Jam achieved widespread fame, Eddie Vedder stopped trying to make commercial music. Even as they experimented, Mike McCready considered ‘Who You Are’ one of the greatest songs they had ever made.
Then again, the song is the exact opposite of McCready’s strengths as a musician. The entire premise of having him in the group was giving them another guitar player with a knack for making bluesy guitar solos, but how do you manage to express yourself when most of the guitar parts on this song could be played with one finger by someone with one month’s worth of guitar lessons?
Most people would find something like this boring, but that was where the group’s head was at going into No Code. Vitalogy had been their attempt to shake their perfect streak by having songs like ‘Bugs’ thrown into the mix, but when that didn’t work with ‘Better Man’ becoming a major hit, this was their opportunity to get even weirder.
Now, with the new arrival of Jack Irons in the mix behind the drumkit, the band had time to flesh out more of the arrangements. Because ‘Who You Are’ was such an open concept for a song, much of the groove was based around Irons’s strange approach to the drums, putting together a groove much more circular than what it ultimately became.
Whereas most of the song is about following along with the groove as Eddie sings the guitar lick, it’s actually a lot more meticulously planned out than many might expect. In fact, the whole reason why the riff is simple might be to make sure that every beat is able to hit at the same time the drum circles back to the one beat.
Before McCready even heard the finished song, he knew just from the demos that it was bound to be something special, telling Spin, “When I first heard that song, I was totally blown away by it. I thought it was the best song we had ever done.” That didn’t mean it didn’t come without some hardship, though.
Vedder also said that breaking down the tune came from his working with world artists like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, saying, “We realized that we had an opportunity to experiment. For instance, everyone has written that ‘Who Are You’ was obviously inspired by my collaboration with Nusrat.”
While most of No Code left a lot of fans confused as to who Pearl Jam even was as a band, ‘Who You Are’ saw them focusing more on writing from a personal place than anything else they had ever done. After years of being in the public eye, this was them enjoying music for the hell of it again, and even if McCready couldn’t lay down a juicy guitar solo, it didn’t matter as long as his playing still served the song.
