HERMITOLOGY

You know, it’s just Pearl Jam putting out a double album’s worth of 29 b-sides and covers, and having one of them become the biggest song in the history of a band that’s sold over 60 million records worldwide.

The yoosh.

Buy Lost Dogs here.

“All Night” as in my lady and I drove “all night” after the show last night, from Sacramento to Orange, for a day off at home, and now I’m operating on ~4 hours of sleep (which is why I’m punctuating this sentence so poorly).

A fitting Random Start, given the subject matter of this week’s 3hree Things. The chorus of this song is totally infectious. I had it stuck in my head for weeks after I heard it for the first time. Backspacer is probably my favorite Pearl Jam record since Binaural, and a notice that even after twenty years, Pearl Jam still has it.

Buy it here.

I can’t hear this song without thinking back to late ‘93/early ‘94, riding around with my good friend Arash, blasting Pearl Jam’s Vs. out of the blown-out stock speakers in his Honda Civic, and hearing him proudly sing “glorified version of a pelican” during the choruses (despite the fact that those lyrics make no sense and are, in fact, incorrect*.)

*But if they were the actual lyrics, this song would be about a glorious sea bird that always needs to be kept drunk or high, which might be kind of interesting.

Although it was referred to as “the album they’d been wanting to make since Vitalogy (in 1994)”, Pearl Jam lost me for a bit with 2002’s Riot Act. They’d been one of my favorite bands for about a decade, and I was pretty disappointed that very little on Riot Act grabbed me. Maybe most of my disinterest in the record was a byproduct of where my head was at at the time (read: all over the place), but to this day, it’s probably the Pearl Jam record I revisit the least. Thankfully, the band dragged me back in with 2009’s Backspacer.

Pearl Jam has been, without question, one of the most important bands of my lifetime, if not the most important. Before I had Radiohead, or Bad Religion, or Tool (and a few other canonical bands that are slipping my mind) and before I was constantly in search of new music for inspiration, I had Pearl Jam. While other bands’ influence was limited to helping shape me as a musician and foster my growth as a listener, Pearl Jam took it a step further and helped shape me as a person.

Their music helped me through the darkest time in my life thus far, when, at 19, three of my best friends (Ryan, Arash, and Bob) were killed in a car crash on their way home from visiting friends at the University Of Arizona. Ten had been the soundtrack to our group of friends’ lives (meaning it was played and sung along to in every car and every house that I can remember from ‘91-‘93.) Vs. was the record that Ryan and I blasted in our dorm room during our freshman year of college. And I wouldn’t be surprised if both records weren’t played at some point on the that last six-hour road trip out to Arizona at the beginning of our sophomore year. It was always there. It wouldn’t have seemed right without it.

Pearl Jam songs were always more than just music to us, but they became even more so after the accident. They’d left such an indelible mark on us that Arash has actually has an excerpt from “Oceans” on his tombstone. As I revisit these records now, they bring back so many memories and emotions, whizzing by like telephone poles as you speed down a highway. They move too fast to focus on one, but there’s a feeling of contentment and gratitude that comes with hearing these songs again. That’s because these songs, like these memories will always be here, even if the people responsible for them aren’t.

*Another (far more eloquent) testament to Pearl Jam, written by Paul Shirley, can be found here.