PEARL JAM ON MUSIC 1. Pearl Jam on Binaural 2. Pearl Jam on Yield 3. Pearl Jam on No Code 4. Pearl Jam on Vitalogy 5. Pearl Jam on Vs 6. Pearl Jam on Ten 7. Pearl Jam on Alive 8. Pearl Jam on Who You Are 9. Pearl Jam on Last Kiss 10.Pearl Jam on Nothing as it Seems 11.Pearl Jam on Light Years 12.Pearl Jam on Soon Forget 13.Pearl Jam on singing 14.Pearl Jam on music in general Pearl Jam on Binaural. "I think in our bag of music, in our bag of whatever's been formed from past influences to current experience, you're gonna reach in and there's going to be similar-sounding things to some things that you've done before, We were able to keep our musical landscape fairly open. I think we've always taken advantage of that. I don't think [this album is] that much different in that way" (Interview - Sonicnet - 5/13/00) ~Ed "While we were making this record, I was going through another bout of drug problems. I had had a period of sobriety, but I fell back into it, and it was bad. I was really going down and was taking a lot of pills. Binaural was made during a real dark period in my personal life. So, for me, that is reflected in the music. In my mind, this is a darker album." (Interview - Guitar World - 7/00) ~Mike "I love Binaural, I think it came out really great. I've been through a lot in the last two years, as have all of us. This album represents a great new beginning for me, and a great new beginning for the band." (Interview - Guitar World - 7/00) ~Mike "At the time, I felt like I was fighting just to live. There was a lot of stuff going on with me that was making things difficult. Now, I feel very, very grateful that I'm out of that phase; I never want to go back to that space again. It's 'one day at a time,' and sometimes it's more like one second at a time. And that's alright. Not only can I function and live-- which is clearly the most important thing-- but I can play a lot better too, which is like the icing on the cake." (Interview - Guitar World - 7/00) ~Mike Pearl Jam on Yield. "When we started making this record, the conversations about touring were pretty dismal. I don't think anybody wanted to tour. The more that we started to hang out with each, though, the more we started to realize that we liked each other. At that point, people started getting excited about the idea of getting together and going out and playing some shows." (interview - Addicted to Noise - 2/97) ~Jeff "I'm always excited when we have a new album coming out, but I have a different and special feeling about this one." (interview - Kerrang! - 1/24/98) ~Stone Pearl Jam on No Code. "Except for a few moments on the first record, a lot of times Eddie's lyrics were just stories to me. I knew he was a great writer and there was a lot passion behind the lyrics, but I didn't always relate to them. On this record, it's like my own thoughts are in the songs... In some ways, it's like the band's story. It's about growing up." (interview - LA Times - 12/22/96) ~Jeff "Making No Code was all about gaining perspective." (interview - Spin Magazine - 2/97) ~Ed "You'd have to figure that any LP I sing on should sell less!" (interview - Kerrang! - 1/24/98) ~Stone "To turn my drum music into a song is pretty challenging, but the guys have been really supportive of me doing it, and we've worked some things into a few songs. On No Code, "Who You Are" and the beginning of "In My Tree" are drum-based, and there are other little parts here and there that I would call "drum music" -- not just playing a regular beat." (interview - Modern Drummer - 6/98) ~Jack "I think it's a good to put that kind of metaphor out there. That way if the record is a complete failure you've kind of owned up to it in a subliminal way. No Code was the same thing. For me, No Code meant 'Do Not Resuscitate'." (interview - Rolling Stone Australia - 8/00) ~Ed Pearl Jam on Vitalogy. "I can definitely listen to every song on the record and get something out of it. 'Nothingman' was written in an hour, and so I like listening to that, cause it just happened and somehow captured a mood there, at least for me in the vocal. Any time I can nail down a song, a thought, in a half hour, that feels really good. We recorded 'Tremor Christ' in a very short period, one night in New Orleans, and I remember what that night was like. I can see how the lights were turned down low. I can see the room. And so I like listening to that. I wrote 'Better Man' before I could drink legally - on a four-track in my old apartment." (interview - Spin Magazine - 12/94) ~Ed Pearl Jam on Vs. "I think we're doing fine. I think we made a great record. Nobody's out buying limos and thinking they're the most amazing thing on earth. There's a natural balance in the band where we need each other. Everybody sees things from their own angle, and all those angles are the archetypes of the things you need to really cover your ass. It's what makes a band to me." (interview - Rolling Stone - 10/28/93) ~Stone "For me, that title [five against one] represented a lot of struggles that you go through trying to make a record. Your own independence -- your own soul -- versus everybody else's. In this band, and I think in rock in general the art of compromise is almost as important as the art of inpidual expression. You might have five great artists in the band, but if they can't compromise and work together, you don't have a great band. It might mean something completely different to Eddie. But when I heard that lyric, it made a lot of sense to me." (interview - Rolling Stone - 10/28/93) ~Stone Pearl Jam on Ten. "When you're out in the desert, you can't believe the amount of stars. We've sent mechanisms out there, and they haven't found anything. They've found different colors of sand, and rings and gases, but nobody's shown me anything that makes me feel secure in what happens afterward. All I really believe in is this fucking moment, like right now. And that, actually, is what the whole album talks about." (interview - Rolling Stone - 10/31/91) ~Ed "The sleep deprivation came into play...You get so sensitive that it feels like every nerve is directly exposed. I started dealing with a few things that I hadn't dealt with, and I had this music in my head at the same time. It was great music -- it was bringing things out of me that hadn't been brought out. I was literally writing some of these words as I was going up against a wave or paddling." (interview - Rolling Stone - 10/31/91) ~Ed "I think we're much better now, live, than we are on the record. The record is fine for what it is -- we were a band for only three-and-a-half months when we recorded it -- but I don't think it's the best we can do. We've been working on new songs and have developed a lot of material, so I'm way more excited about doing the next album. I'm really amazed that Ten is doing so well." (interview - Guitar World - 9/92) ~Mike "We knew we were still a long way from being a real band at that point, and we needed to tour. So essentially Ten was just an excuse to tour. We told the record company, 'We know we can be a great band, so let's just get the opportunity to get out and play.'" (interview - Bass Player - 4/94) ~Jeff "When our first record came out, I was shocked how many people related to some of that stuff. Something like 'Alive,' so many people dealt with death through that song. Like people dealt with the death of love through 'Black' and so many people dealt with suicide through 'Jeremy.' The kind of letters that got through to me about those songs, some of them were just frightening." (interview - Melody Maker - 5/21/94) ~Ed Pearl Jam on Alive. "Everybody writes about it like it's a life-affirmation, thing -- I'm really glad about that. It's a great interpretation. But 'Alive' is... it's torture. Which is why it's fucked up for me. Why I should probably learn how to sing another way. It would be easier. It's... it's too much. The story of the song is that a mother is with a father and the father dies. It's an intense thing because the son looks just like the father. The son grows up to be the father, the person that she lost. His father's dead, and now this confusion, his mother, his love, how does he love her, how does she love him? In fact, the mother, even though she marries somebody else, there's no one she's ever loved more than the father. You know how it is, first loves and stuff. And the guy dies. How could you ever get him back? But the son. He looks exactly like him. It's uncanny. So she wants him. The son is oblivious to it all. He doesn't know what the fuck is going on. He's still dealing, he's still growing up. He's still dealing with love, he's still dealing with the death of his father. All he knows is 'I'm still alive' -- those three words, that's totally out of burden. Now the second verse is 'Oh she walks slowly into a young man's room... I can remember to this very day... the look... the look.' And I don't say anything else. And because I'm saying, 'The look, the look' everyone thinks it goes with 'on her face.' It's not on her face. The look is between her legs. Where do you go with that? That's where you came from. But I'm still alive. I'm the lover that's still alive. And the whole conversation about 'You're still alive, she said' And his doubts: 'Do I deserve to be? Is that the question?' Because he's fucked up forever! So now he doesn't know how to deal with it. So what does he do, he goes out killing people -- that was 'Once.' He becomes a serial killer. And 'Footsteps,' the final song of the trilogy, that's when he gets executed. That's what happens. The Green River killer... and in San Diego, there was another prostitute killer down there. Somehow I related to that. I think that happens more than we know. It's a modern way of dealing with a bad life." (interview - Rolling Stone - 10/28/93) ~Ed Pearl Jam on Who You Are. "I'd been playing that [drum pattern] since I was eight. It was inspired by a Max Roach drum solo I heard at a drum shop when I was a little kid." (interview - Spin Magazine - 2/97) ~Jack "When I first heard that song, I was totally blown away by it. I thought it was the best song we had ever done." (interview - Spin Magazine - 2/97) ~Mike "Everyone has written that 'Who Are You' was obviously inspired by my collaboration with Nusrat, but that's not where it came from." (interview - Spin Magazine - 2/97) ~Ed Pearl Jam on Last Kiss. "Glad people like it." (interview - New York Daily News - 8/10/99) ~Ed "I heard it when I was six or seven, I thought it was a true story, and it made me so sad." (interview - The New Yorker - 8/9/99) ~Ed "I was happy that a song could cut through the normal mechanics of the industry and find a kind of democratic success, just when you didn't think it was possible." (interview - USA Today - 10/8/99) ~Ed "It was a stange little anomaly. It somehow cut through all that (pop) stuff. here was a song that was not produced, it was one take and somehow it was getting played on the radio 'cause it had a nice story to it, maybe." (interview - Rolling Stone Australia - 8/00) ~Ed "That was kind of uplifting, or at least it re-instilled some faith that a good song can cut through, even though there's no dancers on stage when we do the song, or video to go with it or anything like that. That helped me feel like all was not lost or something, at least in our world here." (interview - Rolling Stone Australia - 8/00) ~Ed "It was all natural. If one of our records takes off, it won't be because we did three videos and were on the cover of Time and did Oprah, The View, and every radio station's X-mas show." (interview - Revolver - 8/00) ~Stone Pearl Jam on Nothing as it Seems. "There's one song I'm really excited about called `Nothing As It Seems', It's my favorite Pearl Jam song ever, I think. It's dark and Pink Floyd-ish. I love that." (interview - Boston Globe - 2/11/00) ~Mike "It actually felt like we were offering them something fairly challenging." (interview - Sonicnet - 4/21/00) ~Ed "We talked about four other songs, and all of a sudden someone said, 'What about "Nothing As It Seems?"'. We all went, 'All right, that'll work; let's do that,'. We agreed on it, and we all dug in our heels and said, 'That's what you're going to get.'" (interview - Sonicnet - 4/21/00) ~Stone "That one, we felt like we could [release] and we weren't trying to fool people." (interview - Sonicnet - 4/21/00) ~Ed "It was just a little ditty on a demo that I kind of played some hand drums on, and had this little song. Actually, I spent quite a bit of time with the lyrics, and I think Stone initially said, 'Let's try that one.' There were little sections of the song [where] I definitely heard Mike doing his thing, so I kinda said, 'Hey, man, you need to write a theme for these little sections.' It's pretty cool to see a little song that I wrote being played by everyone. I mean, I can almost kind of stand back and just watch this great band play a song," he added, "and take it to a completely different level. Mike and Ed, they have that ability where they can really raise the level of anything that they play." (interview - MTV.com - 4/28/00) ~Jeff "For me, it's a song about judgment and not always understanding what is going on with another person." (interview - Boston Globe - 5/14/00) ~Jeff "Everybody in the band felt good about the song, because it was different from what we had done before, and as artists, you're always trying to do that." (interview - Boston Globe - 5/14/00) ~Jeff Pearl Jam on Light Years. "With 'Light Years,' Mike McCready had written some music. We were excited about it for a while, but when we got down to recording it, it was too nice, too right there - it was a little too close to 'Given to Fly.' We changed the tempos, and then one night Mike and I, after working on it all day and getting frustrated, just flipped it backwards, and in about 35 minutes it became 'Light Years,' with words and everything. It still has a fairly contagious chorus and melody, but it's just sideways enough to make me happy." (interview - Revolver - 8/000 ~Ed Pearl Jam on Soon Forget. "Ed and Chris Cornell had talked about how hard it is to write a sad song on ukulele, so Ed took that as a challenge." (interview - Boston Globe - 5/14/00) ~Mike Pearl Jam on singing. "Singing someone else's songs is like keeping your clothes on. I like it. People don't think it's all coming from you." (interview - New York Daily News - 8/10/99) ~Ed "I'm pretty happy at this point because I feel like in this last record, every song absolutely feels like...I don't know if this makes sense, but every song feels like me. I think in the past, especially if it was like a third-person song, my voice would kind of mimic the emotion, or something like that. It was more mimicry involved on the third record or the second record. It was like, 'this is an angry song so I'm going to use the angry voice.' And that's changed for me. I haven't really addressed this before, but I think it's almost because there are a lot of singers I've noticed who are sounding like they're mimicking me mimicking. I hear a lot of people tell me about it. You know, they'll say 'I heard this song and I thought it was you, then the song sucked so I knew it wasn't you.' So that became a little strange for me, especially when we'd play old songs live and I felt like, 'oh man, this sounds like some other voice.' So I'm feeling pretty good about my singing. I think everyone's got their own voice, it's just a matter of going through the process to find out what that voice is. And I'll just be honest and say that I'm pretty psyched because I think that I did that." (interview - CMJ - 7/00) ~Ed "I was probably overly aggressive in the beginning. To me, it was just used as a vehicle for...anger. Chris Cornell was over the other night. My brother had sent me some early demos by Nick Drake, and Chris and I were sitting there, listening. All the places where you would naturally go up to perk up a song or create a dynamic, he would almost consciously take it down and add tension. He'd avoid the obvious. It's less spoon-fed and less appealing at first, but you listen and go, 'Wow, there's a lot of dignity in that vocal.'" (interview - Revolver - 8/00) ~Ed "I used to have this thing where I thought singing wasn't dignified. Idiot." (Single Video Theory) ~Ed Pearl Jam on music in general. "The one thing about going from the audience to the stage in just three years is that you know how it feels to be down there. I believe in the power of the music. To me, this isn't just a fad, this is a positive thing...We are trying to make it seem real...relate to our lives." (interview - LA Times - 5/1/94) ~Ed "The only thing that worries me musically is that everything we put out is so under the microscope that it ends up seeping into the songs, and suddenly the music is bombastic just to be able to resist or survive the inspection. There are things on Vitalogy that are definitely not typical, so I'm trying to battle against that. There's two ways: You either give the people what they want, or you become cynical and that protects you . . . I'm not good at either. We're still just being brutally honest and giving it our best. I'd like to say I don't care what anybody thinks, and that I don't play this music to have it be liked. But I certainly don't put it out so everyone can tear it up, either. Actually, I don't know why I put it out. In the old days, it was a dream to maybe not have to work the midnight shift, and somehow pay your rent by getting a check for your art. And, believe me, the first check I got from a publishing company was an emotional moment for me, because it was given to me for something that came out of my head." (interview - Spin - 1/95) ~Ed "Things go in cycles, and people listening to vacuous pop these days, if they do love music, will mature and find better stuff." (interview - USA Today - 10/8/99) ~Ed "Sometimes songs are written and you find little messages in them and you play them every day and they're kind of like little prayers and they kind of keep you on the right track. Sometimes when you're in a band, you know like, I found some messages that I think were written for me to hear, even. I figure if you put it in a song and then you play it over and over maybe it will finally sink in, to even the guy who wrote it. Not sure if that makes any sense. But if you need it it probably does, I'm going to listen to myself on this one, it's called Present Tense." (live - Glasgow, Scotland - 6/3/00) ~Ed "Last time I listened to the radio it was more like, 'Who the fuck is this guy and maybe I should call an attorney! It's kinda funny that you can copyright a note progression... but you can't copyright your voice and the way you sing." (interview - Rolling Stone Australia - 8/00) ~Ed "I guess all I'm aware of is my own personal standards and I think they keep rising. I dunno if it's because of the great bands that I'm listening to and am inspired by. It might not be some of the songs that are on the top 40 lists, but there's a lot of great writing going on and all of a sudden you find your standards are a lot higher than they were. That makes it a lot tougher." (interview - Rolling Stone Australia - 8/00) ~Ed "I read something that might have come out of Billy Corgan's mouth, it was about how, for young people, whose most popular and visible music over the past few years has been dance numbers, the myth of rock n roll show might just be that - a myth. But maybe, on a good night, we'll provide the actual experience. In clubs, they can see Dead Moon, Monkeywrench, Sleater-Kinney, or Built to Spill - bands that provide the magic that can happen with bass, drums, guitar, and vocals. It's been a couple of years and we're on an arena level, but I like to think that we're part of that, that we can be representative of a good rock and roll show." (interview - Revolver - 8/00) ~Ed "Music for me is one of the more healing art forms. I think anybody can put on a pair of headphones and put in a disk or play a record and have it change them." (Single Video Theory) ~Jeff