The three Pearl Jam songs that still “tear” Eddie Vedder up
Memory is a mysterious thing. It’s a slippery, elusive and can sneak up and strike us down anywhere – in the dark backrooms of bars, amid a crowd of thousands, even on stage, years after the story was settled. Just ask Eddie Vedder.
The one thing science does know is that the quickest way into a memory is through the senses. Whether it’s a certain scent, a taste, or even the lighting of a room, any of those baseline, animalistic understandings can spark the brain. However, none of them can do it as quick as music.
Everybody has those songs. There are tracks that, no matter where you are, will instantly take you back to school and to your first crush. Some songs will forever sound like heartbreak, or like that one really great birthday party you had, or to the day you moved house. Songs can trap a memory in amber for a mere listener, so it’s tough to even imagine what that must feel like for the artist themselves when the memory the lyrics speak of is a personal one.
As Eddie Vedder sat down to talk to Cameron Crowe in 1993, it was as if he couldn’t get out of the haze just yet. Having just finished playing a show, he was right in the heart of that shroud, prompted by memories after deciding to play ‘Black’, a song from Pearl Jam’s debut, for the first time in a while.
It’s not even that the songs were all that old by the time this interview happened. It was two years on from the release of Ten. But the act of writing such brutally honest songs about deeply vulnerable subjects like depression and abuse, and then singing them to crowds on busy tours as the band blew up, is not only exposing but just broadly heavy. Having to revisit those feelings over and over prompts an artist to pick a path – you can either disassociate from the song, or embrace feeling it.
Vedder picked the latter. “There are certain songs that come from emotion,” he says. “It’s got nothing to do with melody or timing or even words; it has to do with the emotion behind the song,” he told Rolling Stone, “You can’t put out 50%. You have to sing them from a feeling.”
Three songs especially demanded that of him, and all three came from the emotional release of Ten. Having finished the album’s promotion a while ago, Vedder had been avoiding the songs for a little bit. The subject matter of Ten isn’t exactly a world of emotion that a person would want to dwell in forever, or could do that healthily.
But on the night of this interview, singing them brought the feelings back into sharp focus as he said, “Like ‘Alive’ and ‘Jeremy’ to this day – and ‘Black’. Those songs, they tear me up.” Singing songs he wrote about suicide, sexual abuse and depression, it’s surely impossible to ever go numb to those feelings as a listener, let alone as the person who put pen to paper and poured that vulnerable experience out onto the page.
To bring it all back to the surface, along with the memories that inevitably come along for the ride too – that’s the painstaking duty of the artist, and while Vedder has no complaints about his job, it’s not an easy ask on the heart.
