The Pearl Jam song that reduced Eddie Vedder to tears
The entire road to creating Pearl Jam felt like a neverending uphill battle. Since the band was originally supposed to be Mother Love Bone, things turned dark once their lead singer Andy Wood died of a heroin overdose in early 1990. Instead of spending the rest of their lives wondering what could have been, Stone Gossard made a tape of new songs before stumbling upon Eddie Vedder.
The tape of demos that Gossard had sent out included the building blocks for future Pearl Jam songs like ‘Alive’ and ‘Once’, which started moving something in Vedder down in San Diego. Spending most of his days surfing, Vedder had the idea to create a rock opera around the three song ideas, coming up with the landmark chorus for ‘Alive’ after returning to shore.
When Gossard was listening back to what he heard, he was knocked out by the power that Vedder had in his lower register. After asking him to come up to jam, Vedder was greeted with open arms by the Seattle scene, striking up a friendship with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell as they began working on the Temple of the Dog album.
As Pearl Jam got their first rehearsals underway, though, Vedder still had a lot on his mind about his upbringing. Before moving out on his own, Vedder had been told by his mother that who he thought was his father was actually his stepfather and that his biological father had passed away years before.
While Vedder would write that scenario nearly verbatim in the first verse of the song ‘Alive’, it was the final song on their debut album where he got to stretch out. Written as a droning piece of music, ‘Release’ was centred around Vedder’s vocal performance, as he makes peace with his father and lets out all his grief about never knowing him in song.
Although the band thought they were going somewhere, Jeff Ament remembered how much of an emotional experience it was for Vedder, recalling in Pearl Jam Twenty, “I remember the first time he played it, he just sort of ran away after the song was over. He was too emotional.” After Ament checked on him, Vedder was ready to get back into the studio to run everything a few more times.
As far as Vedder was concerned, there was no need to waste time in the studio, only rehearsing for a few days before playing their first show in Seattle, comprised of many songs that would later appear on Ten. The rest of the album would also run the gamut of Vedder’s internal psyche, singing songs about love lost on ‘Black’ and writing character pieces about different struggling people like ‘Jeremy’ and ‘Why Go’.
In the years since its release, Vedder has also been known to inhabit the song when the group plays live. With years separated since his father’s death, Vedder gets the opportunity to let loose whenever he’s in front of the microphone, leaving his heart open to the rest of the world. While it wasn’t easy moving on from that loss, Vedder still thinks his father can see him, remarking: “He’s still up there, y’know, up in the ether.”
