The Pearl Jam song Eddie Vedder thinks people misunderstood: “It’s not about Kurt”
There’s a good chunk of the rock community who would be forgiven for not understanding half of Pearl Jam’s discography. Eddie Vedder may have put soul into just about every line he sang, but if you can figure out what he’s saying within the first listen, your ears are more attuned than 75% of the listening. That means a lot of stuff gets lost in alt-rock translation, and Vedder himself had to clear up the harsh protagonist in the song ‘Immortality’.
Whereas the last few albums saw Pearl Jam doubling down on their hooks, their third outing has to be one of the weirdest albums ever put out by a mainstream rock band that decade. If you took a good chunk of the songs off the album, it might be among their best, but no one with a straight face will tell you that a record is a 10/10 classic with a track like ‘Bugs’.
Compared to the rest of their output, the band sounded like they were going through some fairly heavy times when making this album, and it doesn’t show more than in the ballads. Outside of the pop jewel ‘Better Man’, a lot of the downtempo material on the album feels a lot more tortured, especially ‘Immortality’, which feels like a funeral requiem for someone who lost touch with reality.
That’s where things hit a sore spot, though. Given that this album was released in mid-1994, does anyone else remember someone very specific who seemed to lose their struggles with reality around this time?
Yeah, the minute that Vedder opened his mouth on this song, most fans automatically assumed that it was about Kurt Cobain’s passing. Even though Cobain had words about Pearl Jam not being truly alternative, he did say that he had respect for Vedder by the time he passed away, saying that he was a really nice person.
When promoting the record for the LA Times, Vedder had to end up clarifying what the song was about, saying, “It’s not about Kurt. Nothing on the album was written directly about Kurt, and I don’t feel like talking about him because it [might be seen] as exploitation. But I think there might be some things in the lyrics that you could read into and maybe will answer some questions or help you understand the pressures on someone who is on a parallel train”.
That didn’t mean the band didn’t show their appreciation for his music in their own way. After they were scheduled to perform on Saturday Night Live shortly after his passing, Vedder drew a capital K on his shirt as the show signed off. As far back as the day he died, Vedder was nothing but reverent to Cobain, saying that he wouldn’t have been given the opportunity to be in a band like Pearl Jam if it wasn’t for him.
With years of hindsight, Vedder still talks about how he prefers to remember Cobain, recalling in the documentary Twenty that “it always seems to come up around a campfire or whenever someone is just passing a guitar around. I just keep remember thinking, you know, he would have liked this”.
While Cobain struggled with the scene that he helped birth, that didn’t mean that the music had to suffer because of it. It was the end of an era, but with Pearl Jam and the soon-to-be-emerging Foo Fighters, we were about to discover that alternative rock was far from over.
