“This is going to be alright”: the song Eddie Vedder thought healed Pearl Jam
Being onstage is a very vulnerable place for any musician to be. Although it can give someone a lot of power when they can lift their finger and an entire crowd can move in front of them, it’s bound to be difficult to take the most intimate thoughts in their heads and then sing them out to the world. So when all of the music resulted in carnage, Eddie Vedder needed some proper time to heal from Pearl Jam before coming back down to Earth with this subtle piece of soft rock.
For the first half of their career, Pearl Jam was a band that lived and breathed on the stage. Their albums were already documents of what they could do in a confined space, but when looking back on the way an album like Ten was mixed, for example, both Stone Gossard and Eddie Vedder talked about preferring the sound of the group playing them live as opposed to all the reverb on the main track.
While the band had started taking control of what they would sound like in the studio, things started to take a sharp turn after they finished Binaural. Everyone was still happy to be doing things on their own terms, but when they performed at the Roskilde Festival in 2000, everything got far too dark when fans were trampled to death after the crowd got too close to the stage.
Vedder had finally learned how to say ‘no’ to certain offers that the group were given, but this was enough for everyone on that stage to question what the hell they were doing. The whole meaning behind rock and roll was about having fun, and yet here they were playing a concert where not everyone managed to make it off of the field in one piece.
It would take a brave soul to even think about going back onstage, but Vedder knew that music was going to be what got him through. He had already used it as a way to cope with the reality of the situation, but right before playing their first show since the tragedy, the frontman settled into his hotel room and wrote ‘I Am Mine’ as a way to clear his head.
While the tune wouldn’t turn up on a Pearl Jam record until Riot Act, Vedder credited the song with helping to keep the band sane throughout the darkest period of their career, saying, “Playing, facing crowds, being together – it enabled us to start processing it. I had written ‘I Am Mine’ the night before– “We’re safe tonight” – to reassure myself that this is going to be alright.”
The reality of the situation may not have sunk in yet, but Vedder had something else up his sleeve when making ‘Love Boat Captain’ on the album. While far from the most energetic Pearl Jam songs, both ‘I Am Mine’ and ‘Love Boat Captain’ feel like twin songs facing tragedy, the former reflecting Vedder’s state of mind and the latter a tribute to those nine friends that they will never know.
For all of the pageantry that goes into making a great show, ‘I Am Mine’ deserves the credit for healing a piece of Pearl Jam that was still a very raw wound. Because as much as they look like gods, they are still people at the end of the day, and it’s always about trying to grow stronger, even when something so tragic comes your way.
