"Leatherman" is a delight, and if asked to pick a single Pearl Jam relic to represent the fullness of what this band once meant to me in the most concise, compact format possible, that "Given to Fly" CD single would almost certainly be it -- I am not sure I ever engaged with something as excitedly as I did with that item during January, 1998, and those three songs still hit an emotional sweet spot (especially when presented in that sequence) that little else in the PJ discography does for me. Some of it is simple nostalgia, but some of it is that those three songs -- isolated from the general context of
Yield -- really amplify
Yield's sense of peace and mindfulness in a format that sidesteps the cynicism of something like "Do the Evolution" and/or the triteness of something like "In Hiding" (both songs I love, but which nonetheless inject different flavors into the overall program). There is no other PJ single that feels as much to me like a carefully assembled short-form EP as these three songs do, not even
Merkinball.
I think I've said this before but "Leatherman" reminds me of
Fables of the Reconstruction-era REM, both in the musical/compositional sense (just imagine Stipe singing that melody and Buck picking out those guitar chords) and in the kind of part-fact-part-legend-style character sketch (reminiscent of "Driver 8" or "Auctioneer" or something like that). It was the first Pearl Jam song I remember feeling lighthearted and whimsical without seeming like a joke, and I'm not sure I really remember one that's struck that same balance so effectively since.
All that said, I think "In the Moonlight" is a better song, equally special to me for different reasons, expressed exhaustively elsewhere.
