Setting Sun

[RockPusher]

Watt's best contribution to this album may be prodding the boys to hit this outro riff. It's gonna be an encore set highlight.

I think Watt's fandom may have allowed the band to see how powerful certain things they do are for us.

[E.H. Ruddock]

Watt's best contribution to this album may be prodding the boys to hit this outro riff. It's gonna be an encore set highlight.

I think Watt's fandom may have allowed the band to see how powerful certain things they do are for us.

Definitely feel this way after this album

[Alive but In Hiding]

This is my favourite closer in a long long time. Just wonderful. The opening reminds me a little of the Tragically Hip.

That's exactly what I thought on first listen. I can't quite put my finger on it, but some combination of Toronto #4 and Flamenco or something? I still hear the Hip in the opening with every listen.

I hear it too in the way he is singing at the beginning. I think it is similar to the way Gord was phrasing things on a couple of tunes on The Secret Path.

[epilogue]

Still listening/digesting/evaluating the record. I'm only six listens in (front to back). But I'm more than comfortable giving this one my first 5 star rating.

5/5, no notes

[stip]

masterful build on this one

[digster]

They go big on almost every song on the album, but this may be the only one where I wish they held it back. I think the mood it sets in the first two minutes is pretty much perfect, but it loses me when they try to make it a rocker.

[dprival78]

They go big on almost every song on the album, but this may be the only one where I wish they held it back. I think the mood it sets in the first two minutes is pretty much perfect, but it loses me when they try to make it a rocker.

the jumping wotman effect

[LetMeSleep]

Massive Led Zeppelin III vibes in those acoustic guitars. And vocal melody reminds me of Comes Then Goes at times.

This is a pretty neat track.

[EJ]

They go big on almost every song on the album, but this may be the only one where I wish they held it back. I think the mood it sets in the first two minutes is pretty much perfect, but it loses me when they try to make it a rocker.

Interesting. I have the exact opposite view. I think too many of the songs go a bit too big. but, this one feels perfect when it does so IMO. I get what you're saying though. I love the melodic first half of the song and it really does sound like one of those Jeff beats that I gravitate towards.

[stip]

The transitions between these two halves of the song (both of which I really love) is a little jarring, but I think that's at least partially by design. The ramp up moments are meant to feel revelatory after the late night beach ponderings of the first half.

[stip]

I also want to repost my Setting Sun post in my review here. I want to come back to these thoughts in a few months when time has settled everything in


Setting Sun

Pearl Jam generally writes three types of album closers. Some are triumphant or defiant (think Release, All Those Yesterdays, Inside Job). Some are quiet and meditative (Indifference, Immortality, Around the Bend, Parting Ways, All or None. The End, Future Days, River Cross). Some are anxious (see pretty much all the songs I just listed). Setting Sun might be the first one to successfully straddle all three spaces.

There are some remarkable tonal shifts in a song that feels familiar and new, like an improvisation on an old theme. There is a real island beach feel to the music, almost like Indifference and All Those Yesterdays were rewritten in a Hawaiian bungalow. Same existential concerns but coming from someone whose life has known real joy, only to see it all fall apart before the end. Before the work is done. Before the need is gone. Or worse, broken and wrecked. The connection gone. The love gone.

There’s a quiet commitment to keep moving forward. To keep searching. Grounded in fear of and need for connection– states of mind explored throughout the record. It’s an act of faith, with the conviction to will it into existence.

Keep knocking the door

Cause I know someone’s there

I wait on the porch

Hoping someday I’ll be let in.

They say in the end

Everything will be okay

If it’s not okay

Well then, it ain’t the end.

It’s not a sentiment all that dissimilar from All or None, though it comes more from a place of hope than muscle memory. It’s explored more openly in the beautiful chorus that ties together themes and ideas that have been running through the record – the need for connections, the longing (the secret hidden in Won’t Tell), the desire to stretch the moments we have out forever. And the recognition that forever comes to an end, one moment at a time, until we are once again alone.

Had dreams to you I would belong

Had the dream you would stay with me til Kingdom Come

Turns out forever has come and gone

Am I the only one hanging on?

The second set of verses and chorus revisit the same themes, the lives shared and lost, and what it means to linger after the people you love are gone. There are small but significant lyrical changes, like the passive/descriptive ‘had the dream you would stay with me til Kingdom Come’ shifting to the more active, grasping ‘held the dream…’

Eddie’s voice lifts the lyrics alongside the music, everyone in beautiful mourning over the too late realization that we failed (or cannot) to hold onto what he have, and the desolating cost of loss. As the music hits its sustained peak, he clings to his invocations:

If you could see what I see now

You’d find a way to stay somehow

The impossible wish to linger on, if not with love than in love. If not in love, then with the possibility of love. For as long as we can. For as long as we need. But not, ultimately, forever. Lives change. Loves change. We change. Our lives and loves change us. And they will end. They must. And we must let them. As the music reaches its crescendo and Dark Matter draws to a close, we are offered our last and final choice. How will it end?

“We could become one last setting sun.” Our light diminished. Our legacy darkness.

Or we can find a way to live on. If not in ourselves then in the lives we’ve touched, the love we shared. The connections we made, and the people who receive our light. “We could be the sun at the break of dawn.”

And when understood that way, turns out there’s no choice to make after all. “Let us not fade…”

Human connection is the dark matter between us. And what we fear is its power. It forges the chains that bind us to our past, our present, and our future. It anchors love. It conquers death. It pulls us through the wreckage of our world.

We just need to see it. To have someone guide us through. Thirty-three years ago, that’s the promise Pearl Jam made to us. Thirty-three years later, miraculously, it’s the one they’ve kept. To keep shouting until we hear. To keep shouting until we believe. Until their voice isn’t needed because we have joined in.

You are not alone.

You are loved.

Don’t give up.

[Ms Harmless]

I just fucking adore the 80s soul electric piano keys in the first part of the song; this to me is pop orchestration done absolutely right, and ties a lovely 80s bow on the album that couples so nicely with its first two 80s-leaning rockers

[VinylGuy]

They say in the end
Everything will be okay
If it’s not okay
Well then, it ain’t the end.


That just perfect

[VinylGuy]

Yeah, sounds like a divorce song but it could also be about suicide too

[E.H. Ruddock]

Yeah, sounds like a divorce song but it could also be about suicide too

I mean we just found out wreckage is about Trump so this could be about anything

[Ms Harmless]

Yeah, sounds like a divorce song but it could also be about suicide too

I mean we just found out wreckage is about Trump so this could be about anything

did we?

[E.H. Ruddock]

Yeah, sounds like a divorce song but it could also be about suicide too

I mean we just found out wreckage is about Trump so this could be about anything

did we?

Doesn’t Eddie say as much in this article?

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/eddi ... -tzrld3kxn

[VinylGuy]

I like the reference to Neil´s Living with War in terms of writing a political song in a poetic way.

[Ms Harmless]

Yeah, sounds like a divorce song but it could also be about suicide too

I mean we just found out wreckage is about Trump so this could be about anything

did we?

Doesn’t Eddie say as much in this article?

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/eddi ... -tzrld3kxn

no idea, can't access it lol

[ABNorman]

Yeah, sounds like a divorce song but it could also be about suicide too

I mean we just found out wreckage is about Trump so this could be about anything

did we?

Doesn’t Eddie say as much in this article?

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/eddi ... -tzrld3kxn

This feels like the writer has mixed up Wreckage with Dark Matter. Unless Eddie is being REALLY sarcastic when he says "If you're feeling the leaving, I can't make you stay
I've only ever wanted for it not to be this way"