‘Corduroy’: The song Eddie Vedder thought was “too obvious” for Pearl Jam
Eddie Vedder never saw Pearl Jam as becoming one of the biggest rock acts in the world. That kind of adulation was reserved for the pinup stars of the world, and even if The Who broke down barriers back in the day, the era of glam rock acts didn’t seem to have any time for authentic music. Time had a few different plans for the Seattle rock icons, and once they became huge, Vedder knew he needed to take control of his craft, even if it meant tolerating tracks like ‘Corduroy’.
Coming out of the massive explosion of Ten, Vedder seemed to talk about his fame as if he were discussing surviving some near-death experience. Going back through his interviews, Vedder was nowhere near ready for the kind of fame awaiting him, and once the controversy surrounding the video for ‘Jeremy’ kicked into high gear, he figured that it would have been better if he never left the rehearsal room.
If the media was going to control him, he was going to at least have control over the music he made. Even though Vs. was just another case of Pearl Jam classics with a bit more grit in their delivery, Vitalogy is where the weirdness starts to creep in just a little bit. There are great moments on the album, but strange detours on cuts like ‘Bugs’ and the closer ‘Stupid Mop’ were a good indication that not everything was right.
Despite insisting on pairing down their commercial potential, ‘Corduroy’ was almost too perfect to include on the record. It had every piece of a Pearl Jam classic written all over it, but the idea of Vedder hearing himself drone on about the problems he had behind the scenes wasn’t breaking any new ground as far as he could tell.
When discussing the tune, Vedder thought it was far too close to what everyone expected out of them, saying, “It is about a relationship but not between two people. It’s more one person’s relationship with a million people. In fact, that song’s almost a little too obvious for me. That’s why instead of a lyric sheet we put in an X-ray of my teeth from last January and they are all in very bad shape, which was analogous to my head at the time.”
Considering how uncomfortable Vedder was in the public eye, getting something like this off his chest was more cathartic than anything else. Once anyone gets famous, the media wants to put them in a box, but even as the face of grunge, he wanted to let everyone know that there was no way they were going to get to see the real person behind the wavy hair and the flannel shirt.
Compared to the rest of Pearl Jam’s discography, though, this is more in line with what Vedder would get up to in his solo career. Since there are only a handful of guitar squeaks throughout the tune and a reliance on acoustic guitars, this actually sounds closer to what Tom Petty was doing around the same time with Wildflowers.
Then again, that was probably how Vedder saw himself in the public eye. He could scream out in pain when he wanted to, but he still wanted the opportunity to be a real person instead of living the rock star fantasy that everyone projected onto him when he walked down the street.
