“Can’t happen!”: the 1994 Pearl Jam song Eddie Vedder almost gave away
There are some songs that were never really meant for the world to hear, especially when they come from an intensely personal place. That was true of one Pearl Jam classic that Eddie Vedder never even wanted to include on an album.
Songwriting is not merely an activity for Vedder; it’s a mechanism that allows him to deal with the cards that life has dealt him and get the deepest things off his chest. It provides him with an outlet to deal with his emotions that he can’t express in ordinary conversation, but even then, allowing everybody to know these parts of your life can be daunting.
The track in question is the Pearl Jam effort ‘Better Man’, which eventually found a home on the band’s third album, Vitalogy, released in 1994. Yet, the song’s origin pre-dates his time with Pearl Jam and has been floating around since Vedder was a teenager. Many things changed in the interim period between writing and recording the song, but Vedder’s strong feelings for the material remained.
After all, the song isn’t actually about him, but about his mother, who didn’t choose to be in the public eye and put her life in the spotlight.
‘Better Man’ was written by Vedder about his mother’s troubled relationship with his stepfather. On the track, he sings, “She lies and says she’s in love with him, Can’t find a better man,” which is a tragic line for Vedder to sing about his own mother.
At concerts, he’s previously dedicated it to “the bastard who married my mother”, according to Songfacts.
It was written in a whirl of teenage angst, long before Pearl Jam had even formed. ‘Better Man’ was first performed live by Vedder when he was a member of the San Diego group Bad Radio, and once they disbanded, the musician took the track with him on his next endeavour. But still, it was a long road ahead until it was heard by fans.
He first attempted to record ‘Better Man’ with Pearl Jam for their second album, Vs. but eventually opted against its inclusion. Rather than sending the song to the scrapheap, Vedder then considered giving ‘Better Man’ away to a different artist. Thankfully, his plans were derailed before he was eventually convinced to record it for their third album, Vitalogy, and it was no longer a secret between his inner circle.
Pearl Jam’s producer Brendan O’Brien later told Spin in 2001 of the story of ‘Better Man’, revealing, “There’s a great song we recorded for Vs., ‘Better Man’, which ended up on Vitalogy. One of the first rehearsals we did they played it and I said ‘Man, that song’s a hit.’ Eddie just went ‘uhhh’. I immediately knew I’d just said the wrong thing.”
O’Brien continued: “We cut it once for Vs., he wanted to give it away to this Greenpeace benefit record, the idea was that the band was going to play and some other singer was going to sing it. I remember saying to the engineer, Nick [DiDia], ‘This is one of their best songs and they’re going to give it away! Can’t happen!”‘.
The producer then admitted he “may have even sabotaged that version” to stop Pearl Jam from giving away ‘Better Man’. While it may have been slightly devious, his cunning plan worked, and with hindsight, it was undoubtedly the right thing to do. When they rolled around to making Vitalogy, Vedder finally “became comfortable with it because it was such a blatantly great pop song.”
Although he was incredibly reluctant to allow the world to hear about his mother’s unhappy marriage, Vedder knew that this song couldn’t stay in hiding any longer.
Over 30 years later, they still regularly perform ‘Better Man’, which remains a fan favourite, just like O’Brien had always envisaged since he first heard it.
Considering how incredibly personal ‘Better Man’ is to Vedder, it would have been plain wrong for anybody else’s voice to have been heard on the song, as he had planned. He might not be the best singer in the world from a technical perspective, but on an emotional level, nobody else could do what he did with ‘Better Man’.
