“One of their best songs”: The classic track Eddie Vedder was talked into recording
Making a record can be both a blessing and a curse whenever too many people are in the room. Having a team effort on any major project is usually what pushes everything over the line, but there are only so many times that people can throw their opinions into the mix before a song starts sounding stitched together rather than a true labour of love. Although Eddie Vedder would understandably have some say in what Pearl Jam released, he was reluctant to release one particular iconic song before the producer and the rest of the group forced his hand.
At the same time, it didn’t seem to make sense for Vedder to call the shots on the band’s first album, Ten. For the most part, he was still the new guy in the group, and since Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard were the most experienced coming off of Mother Love Bone, some of the best moments on the record come from the raw riffs and Vedder’s guttural vocal performances.
But once the band started seeing success that they could have never imagined, Vedder forced his opinions upon the rest of the group. Since he was the mouthpiece of the group, everything that they did was going to be defined by what he looked like onstage, so he might as well start doing a majority of the writing as well.
While that makes much more sense, it doesn’t make for the greatest listening experience going through an album like Vitalogy. There are still a collection of Pearl Jam’s best songs on their third outing, but getting to them also means having to skip over strange detours like ‘Aye Davanita’ or Vedder strapping on the accordion and taking us to musical hell on ‘Bugs’.
There was one shining light that Vedder had in the can, and that was ‘Better Man’. Considering most of the album was centred around a bunch of art-rock tunes, having a song that was pure power pop was like a breath of fresh air for the listener. But when Brendan O’Brien heard the tune, he remembered getting some severe pushback from Vedder before going to record anything.
Since the song was going to be given away for a charity record, O’Brien remembered deliberately trying to sabotage the recording of the demo so they could record it properly on their own, saying, “I remember saying to the engineer, Nick, ‘This is one of their best songs and they’re going to give it away! Can’t happen!’ And we went to record it, and I’m not going to say we didn’t try very hard, but it didn’t end up sounding very good. It took us to the next record, recording it two more times, before he became comfortable with it because it was such a blatantly great pop song.”
And compared to the rest of Vitalogy, having ‘Better Man’ in the mix couldn’t have come at a better time. Vedder had started becoming a reluctant rock star who grew resentful of nearly every bit of attention that he got, so hearing him slowing things down and write a song that Cheap Trick would have been proud of writing was a way of reminding everyone that they weren’t completely devoid of hooks anymore.
In fact, ‘Better Man’ may have been one of the most off-the-beaten-track decisions they could have made at that point. Considering the rest of Vitalogy has a lot of art-rock-infused rants on it, putting a candified pop song in the mix is one of the best ways they could have subverted people’s expectations when listening through the whole album.
