Stone Gossard’s all-time favourite Pearl Jam lyrics
Every great Pearl Jam song usually traces back to the mind of Eddie Vedder. Even though the rest of the band has to pull an equal amount of weight, most of the ethos behind the group comes from the persona that Vedder gives off in every song, either screaming in defiant anger or trying to find some sort of peace within his mind. Although Vedder may look like he steers the ship, Pearl Jam began in the mind of Stone Gossard long before Vedder came onboard.
Forming from the ashes of grunge heavyweights Mother Love Bone, Gossard was initially shopping around demos looking for singers before Vedder’s tape fell into his lap. When working on the group’s debut album, Ten, Gossard would be responsible for the lion’s share of the riffs, including the massive stadium-rock anthem ‘Alive’.
Once the rest of the group became comfortable sharing ideas, though, Gossard would find himself taking a back seat, with Vedder trying to dictate where the rest of the band would be going. Being the main face of the group, Vedder never felt comfortable in any celebrity skin and would go on to make deliberately anticommercial music on albums like Vitalogy.
By the time of No Code, that experimentation did result in diminishing returns, leading to the band making a subtle course correction on Yield. While the album does share a few sonic oddities in common with the last handful of records, the big riffs were out in full force, from the opening smack of ‘Brain of J’ to the sombre acoustic tunes like ‘Low Light’.
When working on potential singles, Gossard had a massive riff up his sleeve with ‘Do the Evolution’. Utilising open strings, the song stampedes out of the gate before Vedder comes screaming in, talking about a particular specimen of human being that sees themselves as the superior race and wants to trample over any other species in his path.
While Gossard would get the credit for coming up with the riff, he would admit that the song had some of his favourite lyrics when working with Pearl Jam, recalling in the book Twenty, “We ended up just using the demo version of the song, which is really exciting. I play some bass and a bunch of guitars on it. It’s probably one of my favourite lyrics I’ve ever heard him sing, as far as the sarcasm and the angle he approached.”
That sarcasm is especially palpable in the breakdown section after Vedder talks about singing in the choir, which gives way to a mock choir singing ‘Hallelujah’ behind him. Considering how the narrator is using religion as a tool to use against anyone who speaks out against him, this slight diversion may as well be sung in jest, as if his congregation can barely believe the bullshit he’s trying to bring across.
While Vedder still wasn’t comfortable addressing the press, ‘Do The Evolution’ would become the first Pearl Jam song in years to get a full music video featuring breathtaking animation revolving around the end of the world by man’s hand. Pearl Jam could have easily kept innovating their sound and losing chunks of their audience, but this was a way to meet their audience halfway while retaining their experimental nature. After all, it’s evolution, baby.
