Red Mosquito

Long Road vs. Wishlist

This is an easy vote for Wishlist for me, but this should be a good match. Two somewhat similar songs with hushed, moving performances. But in the end I love the vulnerability in wishlist more. In part because while Long Road does what it does well, Wishlist is the more surprising song. It's a love that song that's about wanting to be worthy of the person you love - it's a love song that gives when usually they take. And I think Wishlist has the first of the winding its way up to heaven solos that Mike would reproduce, but maybe never this effectively (other than I am mine)

Long Road. Easily

Long Road is a product of its time: a Jack Irons/Neil Young-influenced mid-tempo dirge that was a sharp turn from everything PJ had done before...

But Wishlist is more than that. Like the best songs of The Police, Neil & Tim Finn, The Pretenders, and Springsteen, it's a compositional monster masquerading as a simple little tune. There's a timeless quality to the song that allows me to imagine it sitting comfortably in the 70s, 80, and long into the future. It's one of Ed's finest compositions, and as someone (stip?) posted earlier, the captured performance captures the band fully dialed in, firing on all cylinders.

This is the first year ever that I’d vote for Wishlist in this match, and I just did.

Easy vote for Long Road.

wease wrote:Long Road. Easily

Birds in Hell wrote:Easy vote for Long Road.

I concur.

A good match between relative equals. Voting for "Wishlist" because of all the colorful touches the band adds to it, and because I'm always inclined to give a tie to the Yield song.

Not that this should sway your vote or not, but in the scenario where Pearl Jam is on stage in a huge effin’ place like an arena with no crowd, and they are just playing the song and you are at the soundboard and there’s a huge amount of echo and layers of sounds bouncing off the walls and the ceiling, Long Road would sound incredible.

I love Wishlist, and it's a favorite studio track of mine, in particular. But Long Road may be my most improved PJ song of the past few years, and I already really liked it before that.