A Guided Tour of Lightning Bolt: Infallible
Posted: Thu July 09, 2015 2:28 pm
A Guided Tour of Lightning Bolt
Even when he is writing about characters, Eddie is really writing about himself. He has a hard time placing himself in the mind of another person, which is why a song like Unemployable comes across as condescending even though he is aiming for sympathetic. He is not a working class conservative, and so Eddie is being sympathetic to a stereotype. Fortunately, deep wells of empathy means that he is very good, most of the time, at relating to and then universalizing other people’s experiences. Taking something that exists outside of himself and making it his own, or taking something private and opening it up in a way that still feels powerfully intimate.
The problem he runs into (most regularly with political songs but increasingly with songs about his family and personal relationships) is that he can mistake the depths and authenticity of feeling for artistry, and doesn’t finish building the bridge between a personal and a collective intimacy. This wasn’t always a problem. Most of Pearl Jam’s catalog is about searching for something (be it personal or political). And it is easy to share a journey. But he is now a middle aged, enormously successful, influential, wealthy, happily married and devoted father. He’s arrived. And it is much harder to share a destination.
That is precisely what Lightning Bolt is trying to do. It’s both the strength and weakness of the record. Contrary to a common criticism, Lightning Bolt is more than just a random collection of songs. There is a thematic unity to it (though not a narrative). It is a middle aged record that struggles with what being middle aged means. It’s a record about legacy, about the relationship between past, present, and future, and the fragility, insecurity, and drive that comes with having something, finally, to lose.
Where We’ve Been
I tend to approach Pearl Jam’s catalog as one giant conversation, with each album responding to the one that’s come before it. And so I think it’s helpful to see where we’ve been before we start talking about where we are. I’ll be briefish, since I’ve written something similar multiple times and run out of new ways to say the same thing.
Ten is an album about betrayal—about how to respond when people and institutions fail you in a deeply personal way. There is anger, there is fear, there is confusion, but it gets past that by offering up solidarity as a response (one that plays nicely with Eddie’s empathic strengths as a singer). If the world won’t be there for us at least we can be there for each other. Vs. picks up where Ten left off—angrier in places, more reflective in others, identifying new targets and new fears. There is a feral intensity to Vs. that was lacking in Ten. The wounds rawer, the response sharper. But the themes are the same.
Vitalogy is Pearl Jam’s first truly reflective album in that it tries to understand, in a somewhat systemic way, a part of the problem. It focuses on the commodification of music and art and the need for something to be free and pure to be the basis of something meaningful and transcendent. What happens if that purity is lost to us? What are we left with to build a connection to each other? How do we ground solidarity?
It’s a fever dream of sorts, but somewhere along the way the fever breaks. No Code marks the most important transition in Pearl Jam’s catalog, as there is a fundamental shift in the kinds of songs Eddie writes. With No Code Eddie is not only asking questions, he’s also trying to provide answers—reflecting on wisdom gained from experience. He is not feeling what you’re feeling. He HAS felt it and tried to work through it. He is simultaneously a teacher and a student, and the muted feel of that album is appropriate for someone trying on an uncertain new role.
The message of No Code is inchoate and sometimes platitudinous, though endearingly earnest. Yield tries to offer something more concrete—a program of sorts. It’s an album about escape, distance, and retreat. And there’s a solitary quality to many of these songs that is somewhat new. It runs counter to the message of community and solidarity that defines so much of the catalog, and that tension is one of the things that makes Yield interesting. It’s a record about disengagement that undercuts the heart of the band, and so it’s not surprising that Yield is followed by the most alienated record in the catalog.
Binaural is a claustrophobic record, overall the most passive in the catalog. And this headspace would only be amplified by the external events (personal and political) that influenced Riot Act, a record defined by self-doubt. The record doesn’t quite surrender (and is more active than Binaural), but it’s not clear that it really believes there’s a happy ending to the story. And that’s what really sets Binaural and Riot Act apart from the optimistic records that precede and follow it.
It also helps us understand S/T, a sonic and thematic response to Riot Act from a band fired up and engaged—ready to once again to take on the world and spill blood in hopeless causes because as long as there is struggle there is hope, and there is meaning. Inside Job tries to tie all that together, but isn’t quite up to the challenge.
So Backspacer attempts to do over the course of a record what Inside Job attempted to do in one song. Celebrate a life lived well because it is lived on its own terms. Celebrate the peace that comes from accepting the imperfections of the world around us without settling for them. And with that Backspacer marks the end of one journey and the beginning of a new one, both part of the same continuous story.
Lightning Bolt is a logical follow up to Backspacer (as just about every pearl jam album is a logical follow up to the one that proceeded it), but it takes its cues from the outlier songs on Backspacer. While Backspacer was mostly a victory lap, there were a few songs that felt thematically out of place. Just Breathe, Speed of Sound, The End—these were moments that interjected notes of anxiety, even fear, into the otherwise joyous preceding. Now that I finally found what I’ve been looking for, how do I hold onto it?
This is what Lightning Bolt is going to try to answer. What kind of world am I leaving behind for the people I care about? How do I make it better? Am I going to become the very thing I used to hate? How do I renew those old commitments? And what happens if I fail?
Getaway
It’s easy to see Getaway as a ‘been there/done that’ mixture of a typical pearl jam ‘escape’ song plus some substance free cracks at religion, but I think that interpretation misses the point. The song does take its shots, but the religious references reflect more of a stereotypical conflation of conservatism and religious fundamentalism. It’s a real target, and at least part of what the song is aiming at—but religion and conservatism are not the same thing (I would presume Eddie doesn’t have that many issues with the anti-poverty/environmental stewardship message of the current pope, for instance).
Instead, Getaway shares important thematic connections with Mind Your Manners and Infallible. These are ultimately songs about resurrecting the social and political optimism necessary to confront and defeat the challenges facing our wounded world These are future oriented songs (inspired, at least in part, about concerns any parent would have about the world they are leaving behind for their children) that challenge the self-congratulatory complacency or pessimism that prevent us from responding to a world in crisis and engaging solutions to solvable problems.
Musically, Getaway is an appropriate way to begin the discussion. The music is bouncy and playful, its sharp edges sanded down. There’s something almost conversational about Eddie’s delivery, a desire not to alienate the target as they’re being shown the door. Yet the seemingly lightweight presentation is occasionally punctuated by hints of mounting frustration and rising urgency (the transitions into the chorus, the way the drums start to gallop during the same, the harsher guitar tones that kick in during the ‘Simon says’ sequence, the exacerbated ‘for god’s sake’, and the siren sound of the outro’), all of which adds into a logical and appropriate transition into the much more aggressive ‘Mind Your Manners’.
As I mentioned above, I think it’s a mistake to see this song primarily as anti-religion, with the religious language serving as a stand in for, alternately, a non-reflective and self-satisfied conservatism or a sense of powerlessness and futility (all we can do is hope and pray). Eddie is not really condemning faith or belief (elsewhere on the record he embraces that same language). He is condemning inaction justified through faith broadly understood—faith in our own righteousness as a society/species (depending on how much Daniel Quinn you feel like reading back into Eddie’s writing 15 years later) or the weird way surrendering to your own powerlessness is liberating insofar as it absolves you of any responsibility for your actions (it’s on God’s hands now, since there’s nothing we can do).
I think that message is pretty clearly delivered in the first and third verses. Everything is falling apart and we just either sit there letting it happen or, at best, look backwards for people to blame, rather than looking forward to solutions. Granted the ‘science says/simon says’ verse goes after the fundamentalist assault on reason and science, but I think that also needs to be understood in the context of the song’s larger message about embracing the possibility that our failing world can be saved(and that the principle underpinning science—that the world can be comprehended and controlled—needs to be defended and embraced).
That may be one of the reasons why the song couches its message in these terms. Religion provides the cultural vocabulary necessary to talk about redemption and salvation. But no one is going to save us. We’re going to have to save ourselves.
And that’s the message of the chorus. The ‘I’ve got my own way to believe’ sentiment is not just a simple anti-religious sentiment. This is, after all, a song about belief. It’s a larger statement about having faith in yourself and your own ability to change the world rather than assuming that you’re weak, powerless, and there’s nothing else you can do. In this context putting all your faith in no faith means putting your faith in yourself and the people beside you—an emanant, rather than immanent, faith. We just need the people who say it can’t be done to get out of the way.
Mind Your Manners
Getaway evolves from a conversational suggestion to a frantic plea, and Mind Your Manners picks up with a pretty much identical theme and a similar emotional state. Similar, but not identical. While MYM captures the urgency at the end of Getaway, there’s a confidence and control to the overall performance (music and vocals) that isn’t there in Getaway. There’s frustration and anger, but with an epihanal clarity that comes from finally pulling back the curtain and seeing what’s really there.
Like Getaway, Mind Your Manners is not an attack on religion. It’s an attack on passivity—whether it comes from a smug confidence in the rightness of the world, a loss of personal agency, or simply no longer caring about what happens to the people around you. It’s not hard to make the argument that our civilization is failing. Pick almost any yardstick and it’s easy to drown in bad news. Yet most of these are problems of our own creation, and we know what to do to fix them (or adapt to them). An asteroid is not about to collide with the Earth, and even if it was Bruce Willis is still making movies. So why don’t we do anything about everything?
There are three typical answers to that question. One is that the forces that are arrayed against dramatic social, economic, and political change are too strong—that resistance is futile. That’s certainly not the position of Mind Your Manners, or of the band’s catalog in general—which has always celebrated struggle as an end in itself. So we’ve got two other possibilities. No one is willing to seriously call attention to our problems, or people don’t’ think they can/should do anything about. And it’s these later two that Mind Your Manners is grappling with.
The music starts off heavy, throbbing—like a tension headache after a long day of bad news, but it lifts quickly—as soon as the singer is willing to openly confront the problem. That’s where the lyrics begin. Recognizing that things are going to hell, and that he’s prepared to admit and confront it. Eddie’s performance reflects that. It’s angry but measured, controlled, confident in a way that we haven’t seen in many of the post Riot Act fast songs, where he’s typically more unhinged and unfocused—a ball of careening energy. The music is similarly clipped and focused. It’s a punk song, and it has that punk energy, but there’s a precision to it that you don’t find in a similar song like Comatose.
This confrontation is simply something you don’t do in polite society. The front page of every major newspaper in the country should be screaming with headlines about impending environmental problems, but it isn’t. Today’s lead story in the NY Times is a horse race piece about the money candidates have raised (‘Who is Winning the Money Race’) complete with helpful infographics, but no mention of a slew of recent studies that conclusively demonstrated what we all figured was the case anyway—that candidates listen to (and their voting patterns reflect) those of their primary donors. Money buys democracy, but the world oligarchy is never going to appear in one of these articles. Rising inequality has been a problem for decades, but no one would talk about it until Occupy Wall Street. It’s liberating to finally be able to just say that everything is fucked right now, and I’m going to call a spade a spade (provided we don’t stop there—more on that in a minute)
I got an unfortunate feeling
I been beaten down
I feel that I'm done believing
Now the truth is coming out
What they're taking is
More than a vow
They're taking young innocents
And then they throw em on a burning pile
The focus on the ‘young innocents’ is significant. Not just because the young are innocent—trapped by a world they didn’t make (something Eddie was railing about as far back as Ten, when he WAS the young innocent. Now he has to confront the fact that his generation is guilty of the very crimes they protested). There’s also the concern about the kind of world that children (his and everyone else’s)are going to inherit (a perspective that comes into much sharper focus once you have kids of your own). He comes back to it with a marvelous lyric in the 4th verse.
This world's a long love letter
That makes me want to cry
There’s so much to love, so much to protect, so much of value, to the point that we’re overcome (overwhelmed in Sirens)—both by the intensity of joy and feeling, and by our failures to sufficiently protect it.
This brings us to ‘mind your manners’ chorus—the response from the status quo to anyone calling it into question. Don’t speak out. Don’t draw attention to these problems. Don’t disrupt the way things are. Don’t force me to confront ugly truths I don’t want to think about. Doing so would only make this worse (remember, politics and religion are taboo conversation topics in polite society). This refrain has been on repeat throughout history—shoved in the face of anyone who understood that the real world has to be revealed before it can be changed.
The mind your manners phrasing is particularly inspired (I think this is one of Eddie’s more clever lyrics) because of the way it downplays the substance of the critique by turning an attempt to redress a grievance into a violation of social norms and etiquette (and crams so much into a very simple lyric). Although the political critique of Occupy Wall Street has now become somewhat mainstream (to the point that all candidates have to pay at least superficial lip service to it) the coverage of the movement itself largely centered on the inconvenience of disruption and the ways in which the protestors were strange and unusual—the way they didn’t (wait for it!) mind their manners. And as Eddie reminds us in the second chorus ‘That's all they're saying’. The defense of the status quo due to a fear of change doesn’t offer very much to the aggrieved—and doesn’t solve any problems.
The second verse moves into religious territory, but again I think it’s important to realize that this isn’t a critique about religion in the way we normally think about it (the verses would read differently if it was). It’s a criticism of learned helplessness utilizing religious imagery since it’s such a useful shared symbolic vocabulary.
I caught myself believing
That I needed God
And if it's out there somewhere
We sure could use hymn now
That’s hardly an anti-religious screed. It’s a comment on how wonderful it would be if someone bigger than ourselves could just come along, snap their fingers, and save the world. But that person’s not coming, and we cannot afford to wait. We’re going to have to do it ourselves.
That’s the central message of the song and the second chorus.
Self-realized and metaphysically redeemed
May not live another life
May not solve our mystery
Right round the corner
Could be bigger than ourselves
We could will it to the sky
Or we could something else
It’s not enough to simply be right by yourself (self-realized and metaphysically redeemed) and not care about what happens to others. It’s not enough to waste all of our potential by hoping someone else will come along and save us (a god figure, a political figure—recall the massive deflation of energy after the election of Obama in 2008. Millions of people working to elect this improbable candidate on this inchoate platform of hope and change, and then wiping their hands of the whole thing and assuming their job was done. We elected Obama—he’ll do the rest. Not my problem anymore). It’s not enough to wait until we have all the answers (may not solve our mystery). We have one shot at this, and only one world in which to get it right (may not live another life). The potential is there (right around the corner could be bigger than ourselves) if we do this together and realize what we can do with shared vision (or we could something else—some other alternative, something other than this). And unlike Getaway, which is predominately you and I, Mind Your Manners is a we.
The music backs the message. The music becomes less intense and takes on a questing coloration—asking important questions/seeking significant answers. Eddie’s vocals become double tracked in places (or certainly feel that way), implying the WE that makes this a collective project. And there’s a second guitar under the main riff that’s there from the beginning but becomes more prominent as the chorus progresses—rising, optimistic, promising if not an answer, at least a lifeline. It’s followed by an excellent information overload solo by Mike, a mixture of new ideas, insights, and maybe even answers. It’s not clear yet how they all fit together, but something’s there—we just need the time and the will to make sense of it.
The full chorus (the mind your manners and the response) is repeated before doubling down on the consequences of failure . The opening ominious guitar is sped up, reminding us that time is running out. The slight choral effect of the second chorus is magnified with a call and response section that brings to mind a larger audience and larger stakes (this isn’t just a personal journey). And we’re left with a final warning about what happens if we fail. Eddie is once again using religious language, but again I think this is more because it is useful as a shared symbolic vocabulary. If this was a religious critique it would be way more heavy handed and contain more potshots than it does.
Go to heaven
That's swell
How you like your living (in) Hell?
The ‘go to heaven’ lyric is about assuming our problems are going to be okay—the justification for doing nothing (whether your belief in an afterlife is so strong as to warrant doing nothing, believing that god/history/science has a plan, believing you can just live your life because someone else is going to solve the problem/this is already the best of all possible worlds—in all these cases heaven represents the avoidance of responsibility for the here and now (and wouldn’t that be heaven—to be able to look at a wounded imperfect world and feel totally absolved). And as the last lyric in the song makes perfectly clear, we can see where this attitude gets us.
Lightning Bolt moves away from this theme after Mind Your Manners (though it returns to it later), but the fear and frustration about the world we’re leaving behind, what it’s going to mean for the people living in it, and the responsibility we have to take for creating it is going to travel into the next sequence of songs.
My Father’s Son
It took some time for me to appreciate My Father’s Son. My daughter really liked Lightning Bolt but despised this song, and would pitch a fit every time it came on. So it rarely got a listen. And though there are some nice moments throughout, overall MFS features some of Eddie’s worst writing. Add these two things together and you’re left with a song whose virtues had largely escaped me until I started preparing for this thread. There’s something pretty interesting happening here, and it helps forgive some of the clunkier lyrical moments.
The real power of the song is in the music and performance, rather than the lyrics. My Father’s Son is miserable and haunted, full of anxiety, self-loathing, and ghosts. In a weird sort of way it is pearl jam’s equivalent of Cats in the Cradle. The purpose is not to take shots at an absentee or sub par father. After a certain point in your adult life this would be more pathetic than moving. Fine for Ten, not for a record made 20+ years later. Instead both songs are about the fear and tragedy of reproducing those same destructive relationships with your own children, an appropriate topic for a record that grapples with the idea of legacy.
Since I’m not particularly in love with the lyrics I’m not going to spend a lot of time with them, suffice it to say that the most important line is probably ‘Now father you're dead and gone and I'm finally free to be me.’ What happens if me turns out to be the next generation of you. What if the past is something you can’t escape, something that prevents us from becoming the person we want or need to be for the people that depend on us (a personalized version of the same social/political point made in the first two songs that will recur throughout the record).? What if we can’t escape this cycle and perpetuate it with our children? That’s one of the reason why the lyrics fixate on genetics. What can be more path dependent and inescapable than our genes—the one thing we cannot change?
The lyrical presentation is somewhat whiny and overwrought (and by somewhat I mean completely) but this may be by design—the singer disgusted by the attitude, and the way in which self-pity and blame serve to absolve the subject of any responsibility for their lives, actions, the person they are and the people they are creating (it’s a song about parenting, but depending on how elastic you want the idea to be you can stretch this into a soft political statement as well). Overwrought, but still real—we are always reproducing the worst elements of our past, in our individual and collective lives. Every parent has had that horrifying moment where you see yourself adopting the things you hated about your parent and, even worse, see that behavior mirrored in your children. And the larger political examples are so obvious they’re not worth commenting on.
The music, as usual, helps develop the larger theme. The music is nasty and insecure, the bass line angry and self-recriminating, like the morning after the repeat of a terrible mistake that was never supposed to happen again. The guitar hovers just behind—a shiver up the spine, a stalking memory, intimations of broken promises, past failures, and the ghosts of the people we’ve disappointed. The bridge is one of the more interesting ones on the record, a twisted carnival celebrating a tainted, poisoned future—with a fresh start consistently in view but permanently out of reach.
It would be nice if we could just let all that go (the volunteer amputee lyric—cut off our past) and start over. But we can’t run from it. There is no getaway. We have to confront our past and learn from it. The stakes are too high for us to fail. That lesson isn’t learned in My Father’s Son, but the song is half cautionary tale/half nightmare, one we are about to wake up from
Sirens
Sirens can trace its roots to songs like Just Breathe, Speed of Sound, and The End. These are some of the least aggressive songs pearl jam has written, which may be why My Father’s Son into Sirens is one of the most awkward transitions in the catalog. But when we look past the music and start to consider the two songs thematically, even narratively, it starts to make a lot more sense. If My Father’s Son is a nightmare, Sirens explores the moments after waking—lying in the dark, heart pounding, savoring the gradual realization that it was all a dream. Everything you still care about is lying there beside you. Peaceful, but vulnerable—the nightmare bringing the fragility of our lives into stark relief. Although it’s the direct transition, My Father’s Son is not the only nightmare song on the record. Pendulum, Yellow Moon, every moment of doubt, desolation and failure comes back to Sirens, and the things in our life that help the fear go away—if only we can keep them safe and make ourselves worthy of them. You can make a pretty strong case that Sirens is the most important song on the album for this reason.
Framing all this in a power ballad structure was an interesting call (controversial, given some of the reactions), but one of the things that makes Sirens compelling is the subtle way it plays with expectations. It challenges the listeners by offering a hushed dynamic in a song whose conventions demand that you go for broke—like it’s afraid to wake the person next to them, or voice its fears loud enough for someone else to hear. It’s a power ballad that demands privacy because it doesn’t have the self-confidence to put itself on display.
The music is the beating heart in the gentle aftermath of a vicious nightmare. So much of the song feels alternately muted or distant even as it swells—like it’s recalling images rapidly receding in the way dreams do, or in its refusal to voice delicate and tentative sentiments too loudly, for fear of disturbing the person lying peaceful beside them. It’s an image of beauty you can’t interact with because engaging it means marring the tranquility that is such an important part of the appeal. The doubts, the weakness, the terror has to be something private. It’s not a burden to share. This gives the song a curiously tragic element— its inability to share a gift that would be most graciously received and utter a sentiment that needs to be voiced, but it’s also what makes it disarming and compelling. And so Eddie sings his heart out, but he’s singing to himself (as opposed to a similarly dramatic song like Black, where the whole world needs to hear his pain). The subtle flourishes Stone adds to the song are the exclamation marks to sentences that can’t be spoken. The delicate background harmonies at the end of the song whispered sentiments. It’s not a surprise that the biggest misfire in the song is the solo, which is far too big and brash for the song that surrounds it.
Like so much of the record it's a middle aged song, concerned with the appreciation and preservation of what you already have, as opposed to what you're hoping to find. It's conservative insofar as it's concerned about what you have to lose, rather than what you stand to gain. The narrative details are pretty clear, so I'm not going to go line by line. They set the time and place. I imagine the sirens blurring the transition from dream and reality—the way your mind incorporates the sound that wakes you into the story it was telling you in your sleep. But the rest of the lyrics are simple and honest. They convey the doubt, the fear of loss, and above all the gratitude for possessing a peace and a love you never thought you’d have. Plus a warning. Don’t take it for granted, and don’t keep it to yourself.
Lightning Bolt
If Sirens is the heart, the emotional and thematic core of the album, Lightning Bolt is the blood pumping through it. It’s a celebration of the realization that life is full of people and things (family, music, art, whatever) that inspire, challenge, and reward us as long as we open ourselves up to and embrace them as something elemental and fleeting. It shouts what Sirens was only able to whisper by accepting that the things that really matter to us are at least in part beyond our control, and if we fixate too much on the fear of loss we’ll lose the moments that we do have.
As a piece of musical craft it’s an extremely accomplished, underrated (I think) piece of song writing, despite a number of flaws. It’s hampered by an introduction that requires a bit more subtlety, a chorus that’s a bit too obvious, the hideously terrible decision to cut the song off at the start of what should be an extended climax. The sterile production on Lightning Bolt also does this song no favors. Like Swallowed Whole, this is an outdoor song that needs to convey a much grander sense of space then it does. Lightning Bolt sounds huge, but somehow constrained, like a wild animal in too small a cage. It also may just feel a bit too familiar. Eddie has been trying to write this song for a while, though this is his best attempt yet.
The song starts with Eddie playing the latest variation of his palm muted guitar intro, the notes meant to shiver up your spine, intimations of something sneaking up behind you, intangible but real and about to take on form. Eddie’s voice compliments the effect, deep, whispered, almost like it’s stalking you, though it’s not exactly a predator/prey relationship. Something closer to your partner running their fingers down your back and breathing in your ear. You tense up, but you’re eager for what comes next. It would be better if it was a bit quieter, but the effect is there.
Lightning Bolt also does a great job playing with our sense of timing and motion. It’s a fast moving song, one that constantly feels like it’s rushing forward, even though the actual speed rarely changes. Halfway through the first verse the song feels like it’s entering into a sprinter’s crouch (Unthought Known plays the same trick—the marvelous sense of anticipation) before exploding into a soaring sequence usually reserved for a chorus or a climax, complete with a huge open drum sound that attempts to swallow the song. Mike’s spacy guitar effects are also a perfect complement—little flashes of inspiration rising up and into the ether. The effect would (again) be more powerful if the start of the song was a bit softer, and it does raise the bar for the rest of the song. If you reach this peak too early where do you go next?
Fortunately the song is full of tricks, maintaining its tremendous pacing by lifting us up and dropping us down without ever actually slowing down. After the over the top hugeness of the verse the chorus curves back down, with large, elastic, descending movements into a buzzsaw made of static that launches into one of Mike’s best pure ‘fuck yeah rock and roll’ mini solos.
There’s a seamless non-transition into a new REM inspired verse that manages to impart the sensation that the song has somehow entered a gentler, contemplative moment while rushing along at the same frenetic pace—with a bit too much adrenalin to be fully breathless. The piano does a wonderfully subtle job of calling to mind the same fingers up the spine feel of the first verse, though here they’re warmer, more welcome—the surprise giving way to an embrace.
The final verse once again calls us back to the first, though this time there’s a sharper, crackling, electric edge to it. Mike’s notes once again ascend off into the air as the whole piece takes on an expansive cinematic quality—vast open spaces, rushing wind, shot through with significance and possibility—all the self confidence that Sirens was lacking, the music rising with Eddie’s frantic energy into a celebratory orgasmic climax, a release of the fears that so easily trap us in prisons of our own making. Mike’s little bursts of drifting inspiration transform into fireworks. We even get a hint of church bells ringing in the background, a wonderful touch that always makes me smile. What’s particularly remarkable about this moment is that it wasn’t preceded by the typical quiet/loud or slow/fast dynamic where the offset in styles helps accentuate the differences. Lightning Bolt basically starts at a gallop and never stops while somehow making the listener feel like the song has peaks and valleys. And then of course the song lingers in that ephinial space as Mike delivers a lovely extended open solo celebrating the moments we’re gifted, and…
God damn it, Brendan.
The music is the real star here. Although the first few verses could use a bit more nuance Eddie comes into his own with the questing sequence after the first chorus and the whole final verse and outro. Then again I’m always a sucker for those moments where Eddie goes for broke. Even if he can’t hit the same notes the passion always comes through, and he does move through the song like someone being battered by a current he can’t fully comprehend, and can’t resist, but can swim with, rising in the process.
Lyrically there are a number of nice moments. The lightning bolt image is decent. A lightning bolt is powerful, unpredictable, illuminating, dangerous, and brief. It’s a perfectly fine metaphor for how inspiration can’t be controlled, captured, or manufactured—how it’s something you simply must be open to (benevolent surrender is a theme that runs through much of the song). And he does stick with natural imagery throughout the song, but it might have been better if he had stuck with one image and ran with it. We have seeds, beaches, waves, animals, birds, lighting. Sticking with one of these themes lets you develop it in interesting ways. But maybe this is by design. It’s a decisively indecisive song, full of commitment to an idea it cannot fully comprehend that can manifest in innumerable ways. But while the Lighting Bolt image works as a metaphor, the actually ‘you gotta know you’ll never let her go/she’s a lighting bolt’ is a bit too direct and heavy handed. You’d hope for something a bit more powerful in a song about inspiration.
The verses are pretty clever though, and too easily dismissed (a legacy of the chorus, perhaps). The image of inspiration as a meteor descending from the heavens—dangerous, destructive, uncaring—is a nice one (and like the lightning bolt come back to the otherworldly theme that is scattered throughout the song). Sand is new territory for him (a natural progression from waves perhaps), but works well here. Sand is formless in itself, taking on the shape of whatever is able to hold it, though not for long. It’s not particularly fertile, but then again these aren’t normal seeds we’re growing either. I like the elements of compulsion in the lyrics—the way you’re forced to dig (whether to reap or to sow isn’t clear), the way you can’t stop, the way in which you cannot control the outcome.
The first verse is active—caught up in the moment of inspiration. The more contemplative second verse finds us outside of that moment, waiting for it happen, wondering if it ever well. It’s a stagnant verse, a writer’s block verse, rueful about those moments where we have nothing new to give, no way to meet other people’s expectations, nothing present to make us want to commit to the world, to each other, to ourselves—how so much of our life is spent waiting for those moments where we come alive. But those moments do come, and the important thing is to make sure we make the most of the opportunity.
The things in life that inspire us are temporary. Life conspires against them. The ocean will always reclaim a castle made of sand (and that’s all we ever have to build with). The people we love won’t be with us forever. The next great idea won’t come when called. But there’s always a new horizon (I love the ‘as her birds fall from the nest flying towards the great northwest’ lyric. Incredibly evocative, especially with the music). We may not always be able to see it, and there’s a playful acceptance of the absurd futility of trying to force it (the final comments about death), but there’s also a profound gratitude for it. There’s no way to systematize or control the things in your life that matter, and you can’t hold onto them forever. But we must celebrate them anyway, despite and perhaps because of this.
Infallible
Infallible is the clearest articulation of the idea that ran through Getaway and Mind Your Manners—namely that we do have the ability to challenge and confront a world falling apart, provided we embrace our own capacity for imagination—to allow ourselves to be inspired, to dream big, and to understand that the primary obstacle in our ways is ourselves. In many ways this is one of Pearl Jam’s oldest themes—the transformational power of people, but there’s a (not surprising) older gloss to the presentation. In the past there was almost an aesthetic sensibility to the message. The world needed to be transformed because the current arrangement was offensive. And there was an intense desire to have something to belong to—the pressing need for a world that didn’t alienate you. But that’s different on Lightning Bolt. Art composed by middle aged, wildly successful people with families will feel different. It will be about preserving what they’ve built, the stake they have, and the legacy they’ll be leaving for the people who will survive them. There will be a more explicitly optimistic tone (it only makes sense to read your own personal journey back onto the world—if I can create something lasting out of nothing we all can do it), and anxiety about failure. Before I had nothing to lose. When your music is about your own alienation you’ve already experienced the worst and you’re striving for something better. But once you have everything to lose the stakes become more tangible.
The music reflects that fear. The Lightning Bolt transition into Infallible cuts off what was going to be a soaring, transformative, emancipatory guitar solo and, rising from beneath, we get a martial, pounding, urgent (though not quite strident—the song isn’t going for that tone since it’s trying to persuade, rather than hector) warning. The music creeps up on us, almost stalking, calling to mind My Father’s Son and Lightning Bolt (and anticipating Pendulum)—songs about the fears we can never quite escape and ideas we cannot fully grasp. These can tear us apart if we let them, and the music in Infallible does sound like something falling apart that we scramble to put back together with nothing more than optimism and will (which the song believes is enough). The bridge is thoughtful and hopeful while resisting the urge to be overly showy. Instead of a full blown guitar solo we are instead asked to focus instead on the understated background vocals that remind us there’s a small role for everyone to play. And the song’s emotional climax runs headlong into a discordant wall, reminding us that there’s still much to do, and time is running out. It’s one of their more interesting musical compositions in a long time. The closest analogue in the catalog is probably Rival. It’s a musical vein I hope they continue to mine.
Eddie’s performance matches the song. The verses are an interesting juxtaposition of loud and quiet—Eddie shouting out a whisper, introducing a truth we may not want to hear, but not wanting to bludgeon us over the head with it. He takes steps to ensure we don’t run away like you would approaching an easily startled animal. And the juxtaposition with the go for broke chorus is effective, drawing the listener in and ensuring he has our attention before hammering the message home with the kind of larger than life commitment we rarely see anymore—though it is coming through the weathered pipes of an old campaigner rather than the youthful firebrand first picking up their sword and imagining that a better world comes from shouting loud enough.
It’s not that this sentiment is wrong. It’s just that Infallible understands we have to change something in ourselves—our own limited vision--before we’ll be receptive to that message. This is an old theme in pearl jam’s music, but one that they’ve continued to refine throughout the years. The title of the song is instructive. To be infallible is to have faith in the absolute truth of what you believe. Faith is the right word, because the assumption of infallibility cuts off dialogue, appeals to evidence, any possibility that you may be wrong. It shields you from calling your beliefs into question, answerable to nothing but your own conviction. And our current problem is our own sense of infallibility. Eddie keeps this vague, and you can read your own causes and concerns into it. Maybe it’s an attack on religion (which is an obvious target given the high correlation between religious faith and infallible certainty), but as I’ve argued throughout I think that’s far too narrow a read. In concert this song was sarcastically dedicated to Wall Street and other targets Eddie would identify as an enemy of change. You can easily attach your cause de jour and it’ll probably work.
But it’s really resistance to change that the song (as well as Getaway and Mind Your Manners before it) is grappling with. We just have the most explicit presentation in Infallible (though I think Mind Your Manners offers the most interesting and nuanced pass at this). We face a world in crisis whose magnitude is amplified (in Eddie’s eyes) by this new emphasis on legacy that comes from having children. It’s not that we’re ruining things for ourselves; it’s not the visceral aesthetic reaction to George Bush. It’s the price the next generation will pay for our actions. The opening lyrics reflect this.
Keep on locking your doors
Keep on building your floors
Keep on just as before
Pay disasters no mind
Didn't get you this time
No prints left at the crime
Our ships come in
And its sinking
The head in the sand accusation, the refusal to confront the long term costs of our actions (it didn’t impact me, I’m not directly responsible, therefore I don’t have to do anything about it). We get a call back to the opening lyrics in Getaway about ships sinking --a not quite apocalyptic vision that reflects the desire of the song to ease the listener in to the message, and one that also reflects the time horizons of the problem. Our ship has come in, we think we’ve made it, but we’re ignoring the fact that it simply isn’t sustainable.
And we get our first presentation of the chorus—optimistic, transformative, confident that there’s no problem we can’t fix if we can just focus our attention, imagination, and will towards it. We’re just too distracted, too afraid, too shackled by a deeply engrained sense of learned helplessness to do anything about it. Eddie’s phrasing is simple, declarative, and powerful—the presentation of an obvious truth that we’ve forgotten
Of everything that's possible
In the hearts and minds of men
Somehow it is the biggest things
That keep on slipping
Right through our hands
We have the first mention of the infallible lyric, and in this context the target is less an institution (religion, finance, government) and more ourselves. The infallible truth we need to challenge is one of two things: The belief that everything is fine, the status quo is sustainable, we can go on just as before without any consequences or (and these are not mutually exclusive) our own conviction that we’re so flawed and imperfect that there’s nothing we can do about it except watch it come crashing down on top of us. Lock your doors and hope for the best.
It’s a shame that we didn’t feel the necessary urgency or muster up the will to act until things got this bad. Maybe we needed the threat of an ending to compel us to try and make things better. But we can do better, we just better do it quickly. “Time we best begin, here at the ending”
The second verse makes the religious connection back to Getaway and Mind Your Manners, but also makes it clear that this isn’t really a song that’s attacking organized religion. It’s attacking the passivity that it can engender—the faith that someone else will solve the problems for us.
Put your faith in big hands
Pay no more than a glance
And that’s as much a political lesson as it is a spiritual one, learned the hard way during the Obama years—a response to the naïve faith of 2008 which believed that if you just elect a nice guy who promised hope and change and to not be George Bush that somehow the world would magically transform itself. The lesson learned was that the only way to make the world better is to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself (which is given a nice musical mirror in the bridge where we have a low, workman like background chant that invites you to add your voice in a small but meaningful way, rather than a larger than life expansive gesture). The verse continues, challenging the passivity that tells us that there’s nothing we can do to make things better, this is as good as it gets. And we may hear this from our leaders (it’s easy to imagine Eddie thinking of coal and oil lobbies opposing renewable energy as he writes this) but it’s directed just as much at us. The people who empower them by believing what they say.
The chorus repeats the same sentiment—as long as we trust in ourselves and our own capacity (think the end of Faithful but about society rather than relationships) we can leave behind something better. But that window is fast closing, and doing nothing is so tempting. It’s not for nothing that the song fades out with a warning….
Keep on locking your doors
Keep on building your floors
Keep on just as before
Even when he is writing about characters, Eddie is really writing about himself. He has a hard time placing himself in the mind of another person, which is why a song like Unemployable comes across as condescending even though he is aiming for sympathetic. He is not a working class conservative, and so Eddie is being sympathetic to a stereotype. Fortunately, deep wells of empathy means that he is very good, most of the time, at relating to and then universalizing other people’s experiences. Taking something that exists outside of himself and making it his own, or taking something private and opening it up in a way that still feels powerfully intimate.
The problem he runs into (most regularly with political songs but increasingly with songs about his family and personal relationships) is that he can mistake the depths and authenticity of feeling for artistry, and doesn’t finish building the bridge between a personal and a collective intimacy. This wasn’t always a problem. Most of Pearl Jam’s catalog is about searching for something (be it personal or political). And it is easy to share a journey. But he is now a middle aged, enormously successful, influential, wealthy, happily married and devoted father. He’s arrived. And it is much harder to share a destination.
That is precisely what Lightning Bolt is trying to do. It’s both the strength and weakness of the record. Contrary to a common criticism, Lightning Bolt is more than just a random collection of songs. There is a thematic unity to it (though not a narrative). It is a middle aged record that struggles with what being middle aged means. It’s a record about legacy, about the relationship between past, present, and future, and the fragility, insecurity, and drive that comes with having something, finally, to lose.
Where We’ve Been
I tend to approach Pearl Jam’s catalog as one giant conversation, with each album responding to the one that’s come before it. And so I think it’s helpful to see where we’ve been before we start talking about where we are. I’ll be briefish, since I’ve written something similar multiple times and run out of new ways to say the same thing.
Ten is an album about betrayal—about how to respond when people and institutions fail you in a deeply personal way. There is anger, there is fear, there is confusion, but it gets past that by offering up solidarity as a response (one that plays nicely with Eddie’s empathic strengths as a singer). If the world won’t be there for us at least we can be there for each other. Vs. picks up where Ten left off—angrier in places, more reflective in others, identifying new targets and new fears. There is a feral intensity to Vs. that was lacking in Ten. The wounds rawer, the response sharper. But the themes are the same.
Vitalogy is Pearl Jam’s first truly reflective album in that it tries to understand, in a somewhat systemic way, a part of the problem. It focuses on the commodification of music and art and the need for something to be free and pure to be the basis of something meaningful and transcendent. What happens if that purity is lost to us? What are we left with to build a connection to each other? How do we ground solidarity?
It’s a fever dream of sorts, but somewhere along the way the fever breaks. No Code marks the most important transition in Pearl Jam’s catalog, as there is a fundamental shift in the kinds of songs Eddie writes. With No Code Eddie is not only asking questions, he’s also trying to provide answers—reflecting on wisdom gained from experience. He is not feeling what you’re feeling. He HAS felt it and tried to work through it. He is simultaneously a teacher and a student, and the muted feel of that album is appropriate for someone trying on an uncertain new role.
The message of No Code is inchoate and sometimes platitudinous, though endearingly earnest. Yield tries to offer something more concrete—a program of sorts. It’s an album about escape, distance, and retreat. And there’s a solitary quality to many of these songs that is somewhat new. It runs counter to the message of community and solidarity that defines so much of the catalog, and that tension is one of the things that makes Yield interesting. It’s a record about disengagement that undercuts the heart of the band, and so it’s not surprising that Yield is followed by the most alienated record in the catalog.
Binaural is a claustrophobic record, overall the most passive in the catalog. And this headspace would only be amplified by the external events (personal and political) that influenced Riot Act, a record defined by self-doubt. The record doesn’t quite surrender (and is more active than Binaural), but it’s not clear that it really believes there’s a happy ending to the story. And that’s what really sets Binaural and Riot Act apart from the optimistic records that precede and follow it.
It also helps us understand S/T, a sonic and thematic response to Riot Act from a band fired up and engaged—ready to once again to take on the world and spill blood in hopeless causes because as long as there is struggle there is hope, and there is meaning. Inside Job tries to tie all that together, but isn’t quite up to the challenge.
So Backspacer attempts to do over the course of a record what Inside Job attempted to do in one song. Celebrate a life lived well because it is lived on its own terms. Celebrate the peace that comes from accepting the imperfections of the world around us without settling for them. And with that Backspacer marks the end of one journey and the beginning of a new one, both part of the same continuous story.
Lightning Bolt is a logical follow up to Backspacer (as just about every pearl jam album is a logical follow up to the one that proceeded it), but it takes its cues from the outlier songs on Backspacer. While Backspacer was mostly a victory lap, there were a few songs that felt thematically out of place. Just Breathe, Speed of Sound, The End—these were moments that interjected notes of anxiety, even fear, into the otherwise joyous preceding. Now that I finally found what I’ve been looking for, how do I hold onto it?
This is what Lightning Bolt is going to try to answer. What kind of world am I leaving behind for the people I care about? How do I make it better? Am I going to become the very thing I used to hate? How do I renew those old commitments? And what happens if I fail?
Getaway
It’s easy to see Getaway as a ‘been there/done that’ mixture of a typical pearl jam ‘escape’ song plus some substance free cracks at religion, but I think that interpretation misses the point. The song does take its shots, but the religious references reflect more of a stereotypical conflation of conservatism and religious fundamentalism. It’s a real target, and at least part of what the song is aiming at—but religion and conservatism are not the same thing (I would presume Eddie doesn’t have that many issues with the anti-poverty/environmental stewardship message of the current pope, for instance).
Instead, Getaway shares important thematic connections with Mind Your Manners and Infallible. These are ultimately songs about resurrecting the social and political optimism necessary to confront and defeat the challenges facing our wounded world These are future oriented songs (inspired, at least in part, about concerns any parent would have about the world they are leaving behind for their children) that challenge the self-congratulatory complacency or pessimism that prevent us from responding to a world in crisis and engaging solutions to solvable problems.
Musically, Getaway is an appropriate way to begin the discussion. The music is bouncy and playful, its sharp edges sanded down. There’s something almost conversational about Eddie’s delivery, a desire not to alienate the target as they’re being shown the door. Yet the seemingly lightweight presentation is occasionally punctuated by hints of mounting frustration and rising urgency (the transitions into the chorus, the way the drums start to gallop during the same, the harsher guitar tones that kick in during the ‘Simon says’ sequence, the exacerbated ‘for god’s sake’, and the siren sound of the outro’), all of which adds into a logical and appropriate transition into the much more aggressive ‘Mind Your Manners’.
As I mentioned above, I think it’s a mistake to see this song primarily as anti-religion, with the religious language serving as a stand in for, alternately, a non-reflective and self-satisfied conservatism or a sense of powerlessness and futility (all we can do is hope and pray). Eddie is not really condemning faith or belief (elsewhere on the record he embraces that same language). He is condemning inaction justified through faith broadly understood—faith in our own righteousness as a society/species (depending on how much Daniel Quinn you feel like reading back into Eddie’s writing 15 years later) or the weird way surrendering to your own powerlessness is liberating insofar as it absolves you of any responsibility for your actions (it’s on God’s hands now, since there’s nothing we can do).
I think that message is pretty clearly delivered in the first and third verses. Everything is falling apart and we just either sit there letting it happen or, at best, look backwards for people to blame, rather than looking forward to solutions. Granted the ‘science says/simon says’ verse goes after the fundamentalist assault on reason and science, but I think that also needs to be understood in the context of the song’s larger message about embracing the possibility that our failing world can be saved(and that the principle underpinning science—that the world can be comprehended and controlled—needs to be defended and embraced).
That may be one of the reasons why the song couches its message in these terms. Religion provides the cultural vocabulary necessary to talk about redemption and salvation. But no one is going to save us. We’re going to have to save ourselves.
And that’s the message of the chorus. The ‘I’ve got my own way to believe’ sentiment is not just a simple anti-religious sentiment. This is, after all, a song about belief. It’s a larger statement about having faith in yourself and your own ability to change the world rather than assuming that you’re weak, powerless, and there’s nothing else you can do. In this context putting all your faith in no faith means putting your faith in yourself and the people beside you—an emanant, rather than immanent, faith. We just need the people who say it can’t be done to get out of the way.
Mind Your Manners
Getaway evolves from a conversational suggestion to a frantic plea, and Mind Your Manners picks up with a pretty much identical theme and a similar emotional state. Similar, but not identical. While MYM captures the urgency at the end of Getaway, there’s a confidence and control to the overall performance (music and vocals) that isn’t there in Getaway. There’s frustration and anger, but with an epihanal clarity that comes from finally pulling back the curtain and seeing what’s really there.
Like Getaway, Mind Your Manners is not an attack on religion. It’s an attack on passivity—whether it comes from a smug confidence in the rightness of the world, a loss of personal agency, or simply no longer caring about what happens to the people around you. It’s not hard to make the argument that our civilization is failing. Pick almost any yardstick and it’s easy to drown in bad news. Yet most of these are problems of our own creation, and we know what to do to fix them (or adapt to them). An asteroid is not about to collide with the Earth, and even if it was Bruce Willis is still making movies. So why don’t we do anything about everything?
There are three typical answers to that question. One is that the forces that are arrayed against dramatic social, economic, and political change are too strong—that resistance is futile. That’s certainly not the position of Mind Your Manners, or of the band’s catalog in general—which has always celebrated struggle as an end in itself. So we’ve got two other possibilities. No one is willing to seriously call attention to our problems, or people don’t’ think they can/should do anything about. And it’s these later two that Mind Your Manners is grappling with.
The music starts off heavy, throbbing—like a tension headache after a long day of bad news, but it lifts quickly—as soon as the singer is willing to openly confront the problem. That’s where the lyrics begin. Recognizing that things are going to hell, and that he’s prepared to admit and confront it. Eddie’s performance reflects that. It’s angry but measured, controlled, confident in a way that we haven’t seen in many of the post Riot Act fast songs, where he’s typically more unhinged and unfocused—a ball of careening energy. The music is similarly clipped and focused. It’s a punk song, and it has that punk energy, but there’s a precision to it that you don’t find in a similar song like Comatose.
This confrontation is simply something you don’t do in polite society. The front page of every major newspaper in the country should be screaming with headlines about impending environmental problems, but it isn’t. Today’s lead story in the NY Times is a horse race piece about the money candidates have raised (‘Who is Winning the Money Race’) complete with helpful infographics, but no mention of a slew of recent studies that conclusively demonstrated what we all figured was the case anyway—that candidates listen to (and their voting patterns reflect) those of their primary donors. Money buys democracy, but the world oligarchy is never going to appear in one of these articles. Rising inequality has been a problem for decades, but no one would talk about it until Occupy Wall Street. It’s liberating to finally be able to just say that everything is fucked right now, and I’m going to call a spade a spade (provided we don’t stop there—more on that in a minute)
I got an unfortunate feeling
I been beaten down
I feel that I'm done believing
Now the truth is coming out
What they're taking is
More than a vow
They're taking young innocents
And then they throw em on a burning pile
The focus on the ‘young innocents’ is significant. Not just because the young are innocent—trapped by a world they didn’t make (something Eddie was railing about as far back as Ten, when he WAS the young innocent. Now he has to confront the fact that his generation is guilty of the very crimes they protested). There’s also the concern about the kind of world that children (his and everyone else’s)are going to inherit (a perspective that comes into much sharper focus once you have kids of your own). He comes back to it with a marvelous lyric in the 4th verse.
This world's a long love letter
That makes me want to cry
There’s so much to love, so much to protect, so much of value, to the point that we’re overcome (overwhelmed in Sirens)—both by the intensity of joy and feeling, and by our failures to sufficiently protect it.
This brings us to ‘mind your manners’ chorus—the response from the status quo to anyone calling it into question. Don’t speak out. Don’t draw attention to these problems. Don’t disrupt the way things are. Don’t force me to confront ugly truths I don’t want to think about. Doing so would only make this worse (remember, politics and religion are taboo conversation topics in polite society). This refrain has been on repeat throughout history—shoved in the face of anyone who understood that the real world has to be revealed before it can be changed.
The mind your manners phrasing is particularly inspired (I think this is one of Eddie’s more clever lyrics) because of the way it downplays the substance of the critique by turning an attempt to redress a grievance into a violation of social norms and etiquette (and crams so much into a very simple lyric). Although the political critique of Occupy Wall Street has now become somewhat mainstream (to the point that all candidates have to pay at least superficial lip service to it) the coverage of the movement itself largely centered on the inconvenience of disruption and the ways in which the protestors were strange and unusual—the way they didn’t (wait for it!) mind their manners. And as Eddie reminds us in the second chorus ‘That's all they're saying’. The defense of the status quo due to a fear of change doesn’t offer very much to the aggrieved—and doesn’t solve any problems.
The second verse moves into religious territory, but again I think it’s important to realize that this isn’t a critique about religion in the way we normally think about it (the verses would read differently if it was). It’s a criticism of learned helplessness utilizing religious imagery since it’s such a useful shared symbolic vocabulary.
I caught myself believing
That I needed God
And if it's out there somewhere
We sure could use hymn now
That’s hardly an anti-religious screed. It’s a comment on how wonderful it would be if someone bigger than ourselves could just come along, snap their fingers, and save the world. But that person’s not coming, and we cannot afford to wait. We’re going to have to do it ourselves.
That’s the central message of the song and the second chorus.
Self-realized and metaphysically redeemed
May not live another life
May not solve our mystery
Right round the corner
Could be bigger than ourselves
We could will it to the sky
Or we could something else
It’s not enough to simply be right by yourself (self-realized and metaphysically redeemed) and not care about what happens to others. It’s not enough to waste all of our potential by hoping someone else will come along and save us (a god figure, a political figure—recall the massive deflation of energy after the election of Obama in 2008. Millions of people working to elect this improbable candidate on this inchoate platform of hope and change, and then wiping their hands of the whole thing and assuming their job was done. We elected Obama—he’ll do the rest. Not my problem anymore). It’s not enough to wait until we have all the answers (may not solve our mystery). We have one shot at this, and only one world in which to get it right (may not live another life). The potential is there (right around the corner could be bigger than ourselves) if we do this together and realize what we can do with shared vision (or we could something else—some other alternative, something other than this). And unlike Getaway, which is predominately you and I, Mind Your Manners is a we.
The music backs the message. The music becomes less intense and takes on a questing coloration—asking important questions/seeking significant answers. Eddie’s vocals become double tracked in places (or certainly feel that way), implying the WE that makes this a collective project. And there’s a second guitar under the main riff that’s there from the beginning but becomes more prominent as the chorus progresses—rising, optimistic, promising if not an answer, at least a lifeline. It’s followed by an excellent information overload solo by Mike, a mixture of new ideas, insights, and maybe even answers. It’s not clear yet how they all fit together, but something’s there—we just need the time and the will to make sense of it.
The full chorus (the mind your manners and the response) is repeated before doubling down on the consequences of failure . The opening ominious guitar is sped up, reminding us that time is running out. The slight choral effect of the second chorus is magnified with a call and response section that brings to mind a larger audience and larger stakes (this isn’t just a personal journey). And we’re left with a final warning about what happens if we fail. Eddie is once again using religious language, but again I think this is more because it is useful as a shared symbolic vocabulary. If this was a religious critique it would be way more heavy handed and contain more potshots than it does.
Go to heaven
That's swell
How you like your living (in) Hell?
The ‘go to heaven’ lyric is about assuming our problems are going to be okay—the justification for doing nothing (whether your belief in an afterlife is so strong as to warrant doing nothing, believing that god/history/science has a plan, believing you can just live your life because someone else is going to solve the problem/this is already the best of all possible worlds—in all these cases heaven represents the avoidance of responsibility for the here and now (and wouldn’t that be heaven—to be able to look at a wounded imperfect world and feel totally absolved). And as the last lyric in the song makes perfectly clear, we can see where this attitude gets us.
Lightning Bolt moves away from this theme after Mind Your Manners (though it returns to it later), but the fear and frustration about the world we’re leaving behind, what it’s going to mean for the people living in it, and the responsibility we have to take for creating it is going to travel into the next sequence of songs.
My Father’s Son
It took some time for me to appreciate My Father’s Son. My daughter really liked Lightning Bolt but despised this song, and would pitch a fit every time it came on. So it rarely got a listen. And though there are some nice moments throughout, overall MFS features some of Eddie’s worst writing. Add these two things together and you’re left with a song whose virtues had largely escaped me until I started preparing for this thread. There’s something pretty interesting happening here, and it helps forgive some of the clunkier lyrical moments.
The real power of the song is in the music and performance, rather than the lyrics. My Father’s Son is miserable and haunted, full of anxiety, self-loathing, and ghosts. In a weird sort of way it is pearl jam’s equivalent of Cats in the Cradle. The purpose is not to take shots at an absentee or sub par father. After a certain point in your adult life this would be more pathetic than moving. Fine for Ten, not for a record made 20+ years later. Instead both songs are about the fear and tragedy of reproducing those same destructive relationships with your own children, an appropriate topic for a record that grapples with the idea of legacy.
Since I’m not particularly in love with the lyrics I’m not going to spend a lot of time with them, suffice it to say that the most important line is probably ‘Now father you're dead and gone and I'm finally free to be me.’ What happens if me turns out to be the next generation of you. What if the past is something you can’t escape, something that prevents us from becoming the person we want or need to be for the people that depend on us (a personalized version of the same social/political point made in the first two songs that will recur throughout the record).? What if we can’t escape this cycle and perpetuate it with our children? That’s one of the reason why the lyrics fixate on genetics. What can be more path dependent and inescapable than our genes—the one thing we cannot change?
The lyrical presentation is somewhat whiny and overwrought (and by somewhat I mean completely) but this may be by design—the singer disgusted by the attitude, and the way in which self-pity and blame serve to absolve the subject of any responsibility for their lives, actions, the person they are and the people they are creating (it’s a song about parenting, but depending on how elastic you want the idea to be you can stretch this into a soft political statement as well). Overwrought, but still real—we are always reproducing the worst elements of our past, in our individual and collective lives. Every parent has had that horrifying moment where you see yourself adopting the things you hated about your parent and, even worse, see that behavior mirrored in your children. And the larger political examples are so obvious they’re not worth commenting on.
The music, as usual, helps develop the larger theme. The music is nasty and insecure, the bass line angry and self-recriminating, like the morning after the repeat of a terrible mistake that was never supposed to happen again. The guitar hovers just behind—a shiver up the spine, a stalking memory, intimations of broken promises, past failures, and the ghosts of the people we’ve disappointed. The bridge is one of the more interesting ones on the record, a twisted carnival celebrating a tainted, poisoned future—with a fresh start consistently in view but permanently out of reach.
It would be nice if we could just let all that go (the volunteer amputee lyric—cut off our past) and start over. But we can’t run from it. There is no getaway. We have to confront our past and learn from it. The stakes are too high for us to fail. That lesson isn’t learned in My Father’s Son, but the song is half cautionary tale/half nightmare, one we are about to wake up from
Sirens
Sirens can trace its roots to songs like Just Breathe, Speed of Sound, and The End. These are some of the least aggressive songs pearl jam has written, which may be why My Father’s Son into Sirens is one of the most awkward transitions in the catalog. But when we look past the music and start to consider the two songs thematically, even narratively, it starts to make a lot more sense. If My Father’s Son is a nightmare, Sirens explores the moments after waking—lying in the dark, heart pounding, savoring the gradual realization that it was all a dream. Everything you still care about is lying there beside you. Peaceful, but vulnerable—the nightmare bringing the fragility of our lives into stark relief. Although it’s the direct transition, My Father’s Son is not the only nightmare song on the record. Pendulum, Yellow Moon, every moment of doubt, desolation and failure comes back to Sirens, and the things in our life that help the fear go away—if only we can keep them safe and make ourselves worthy of them. You can make a pretty strong case that Sirens is the most important song on the album for this reason.
Framing all this in a power ballad structure was an interesting call (controversial, given some of the reactions), but one of the things that makes Sirens compelling is the subtle way it plays with expectations. It challenges the listeners by offering a hushed dynamic in a song whose conventions demand that you go for broke—like it’s afraid to wake the person next to them, or voice its fears loud enough for someone else to hear. It’s a power ballad that demands privacy because it doesn’t have the self-confidence to put itself on display.
The music is the beating heart in the gentle aftermath of a vicious nightmare. So much of the song feels alternately muted or distant even as it swells—like it’s recalling images rapidly receding in the way dreams do, or in its refusal to voice delicate and tentative sentiments too loudly, for fear of disturbing the person lying peaceful beside them. It’s an image of beauty you can’t interact with because engaging it means marring the tranquility that is such an important part of the appeal. The doubts, the weakness, the terror has to be something private. It’s not a burden to share. This gives the song a curiously tragic element— its inability to share a gift that would be most graciously received and utter a sentiment that needs to be voiced, but it’s also what makes it disarming and compelling. And so Eddie sings his heart out, but he’s singing to himself (as opposed to a similarly dramatic song like Black, where the whole world needs to hear his pain). The subtle flourishes Stone adds to the song are the exclamation marks to sentences that can’t be spoken. The delicate background harmonies at the end of the song whispered sentiments. It’s not a surprise that the biggest misfire in the song is the solo, which is far too big and brash for the song that surrounds it.
Like so much of the record it's a middle aged song, concerned with the appreciation and preservation of what you already have, as opposed to what you're hoping to find. It's conservative insofar as it's concerned about what you have to lose, rather than what you stand to gain. The narrative details are pretty clear, so I'm not going to go line by line. They set the time and place. I imagine the sirens blurring the transition from dream and reality—the way your mind incorporates the sound that wakes you into the story it was telling you in your sleep. But the rest of the lyrics are simple and honest. They convey the doubt, the fear of loss, and above all the gratitude for possessing a peace and a love you never thought you’d have. Plus a warning. Don’t take it for granted, and don’t keep it to yourself.
Lightning Bolt
If Sirens is the heart, the emotional and thematic core of the album, Lightning Bolt is the blood pumping through it. It’s a celebration of the realization that life is full of people and things (family, music, art, whatever) that inspire, challenge, and reward us as long as we open ourselves up to and embrace them as something elemental and fleeting. It shouts what Sirens was only able to whisper by accepting that the things that really matter to us are at least in part beyond our control, and if we fixate too much on the fear of loss we’ll lose the moments that we do have.
As a piece of musical craft it’s an extremely accomplished, underrated (I think) piece of song writing, despite a number of flaws. It’s hampered by an introduction that requires a bit more subtlety, a chorus that’s a bit too obvious, the hideously terrible decision to cut the song off at the start of what should be an extended climax. The sterile production on Lightning Bolt also does this song no favors. Like Swallowed Whole, this is an outdoor song that needs to convey a much grander sense of space then it does. Lightning Bolt sounds huge, but somehow constrained, like a wild animal in too small a cage. It also may just feel a bit too familiar. Eddie has been trying to write this song for a while, though this is his best attempt yet.
The song starts with Eddie playing the latest variation of his palm muted guitar intro, the notes meant to shiver up your spine, intimations of something sneaking up behind you, intangible but real and about to take on form. Eddie’s voice compliments the effect, deep, whispered, almost like it’s stalking you, though it’s not exactly a predator/prey relationship. Something closer to your partner running their fingers down your back and breathing in your ear. You tense up, but you’re eager for what comes next. It would be better if it was a bit quieter, but the effect is there.
Lightning Bolt also does a great job playing with our sense of timing and motion. It’s a fast moving song, one that constantly feels like it’s rushing forward, even though the actual speed rarely changes. Halfway through the first verse the song feels like it’s entering into a sprinter’s crouch (Unthought Known plays the same trick—the marvelous sense of anticipation) before exploding into a soaring sequence usually reserved for a chorus or a climax, complete with a huge open drum sound that attempts to swallow the song. Mike’s spacy guitar effects are also a perfect complement—little flashes of inspiration rising up and into the ether. The effect would (again) be more powerful if the start of the song was a bit softer, and it does raise the bar for the rest of the song. If you reach this peak too early where do you go next?
Fortunately the song is full of tricks, maintaining its tremendous pacing by lifting us up and dropping us down without ever actually slowing down. After the over the top hugeness of the verse the chorus curves back down, with large, elastic, descending movements into a buzzsaw made of static that launches into one of Mike’s best pure ‘fuck yeah rock and roll’ mini solos.
There’s a seamless non-transition into a new REM inspired verse that manages to impart the sensation that the song has somehow entered a gentler, contemplative moment while rushing along at the same frenetic pace—with a bit too much adrenalin to be fully breathless. The piano does a wonderfully subtle job of calling to mind the same fingers up the spine feel of the first verse, though here they’re warmer, more welcome—the surprise giving way to an embrace.
The final verse once again calls us back to the first, though this time there’s a sharper, crackling, electric edge to it. Mike’s notes once again ascend off into the air as the whole piece takes on an expansive cinematic quality—vast open spaces, rushing wind, shot through with significance and possibility—all the self confidence that Sirens was lacking, the music rising with Eddie’s frantic energy into a celebratory orgasmic climax, a release of the fears that so easily trap us in prisons of our own making. Mike’s little bursts of drifting inspiration transform into fireworks. We even get a hint of church bells ringing in the background, a wonderful touch that always makes me smile. What’s particularly remarkable about this moment is that it wasn’t preceded by the typical quiet/loud or slow/fast dynamic where the offset in styles helps accentuate the differences. Lightning Bolt basically starts at a gallop and never stops while somehow making the listener feel like the song has peaks and valleys. And then of course the song lingers in that ephinial space as Mike delivers a lovely extended open solo celebrating the moments we’re gifted, and…
God damn it, Brendan.
The music is the real star here. Although the first few verses could use a bit more nuance Eddie comes into his own with the questing sequence after the first chorus and the whole final verse and outro. Then again I’m always a sucker for those moments where Eddie goes for broke. Even if he can’t hit the same notes the passion always comes through, and he does move through the song like someone being battered by a current he can’t fully comprehend, and can’t resist, but can swim with, rising in the process.
Lyrically there are a number of nice moments. The lightning bolt image is decent. A lightning bolt is powerful, unpredictable, illuminating, dangerous, and brief. It’s a perfectly fine metaphor for how inspiration can’t be controlled, captured, or manufactured—how it’s something you simply must be open to (benevolent surrender is a theme that runs through much of the song). And he does stick with natural imagery throughout the song, but it might have been better if he had stuck with one image and ran with it. We have seeds, beaches, waves, animals, birds, lighting. Sticking with one of these themes lets you develop it in interesting ways. But maybe this is by design. It’s a decisively indecisive song, full of commitment to an idea it cannot fully comprehend that can manifest in innumerable ways. But while the Lighting Bolt image works as a metaphor, the actually ‘you gotta know you’ll never let her go/she’s a lighting bolt’ is a bit too direct and heavy handed. You’d hope for something a bit more powerful in a song about inspiration.
The verses are pretty clever though, and too easily dismissed (a legacy of the chorus, perhaps). The image of inspiration as a meteor descending from the heavens—dangerous, destructive, uncaring—is a nice one (and like the lightning bolt come back to the otherworldly theme that is scattered throughout the song). Sand is new territory for him (a natural progression from waves perhaps), but works well here. Sand is formless in itself, taking on the shape of whatever is able to hold it, though not for long. It’s not particularly fertile, but then again these aren’t normal seeds we’re growing either. I like the elements of compulsion in the lyrics—the way you’re forced to dig (whether to reap or to sow isn’t clear), the way you can’t stop, the way in which you cannot control the outcome.
The first verse is active—caught up in the moment of inspiration. The more contemplative second verse finds us outside of that moment, waiting for it happen, wondering if it ever well. It’s a stagnant verse, a writer’s block verse, rueful about those moments where we have nothing new to give, no way to meet other people’s expectations, nothing present to make us want to commit to the world, to each other, to ourselves—how so much of our life is spent waiting for those moments where we come alive. But those moments do come, and the important thing is to make sure we make the most of the opportunity.
The things in life that inspire us are temporary. Life conspires against them. The ocean will always reclaim a castle made of sand (and that’s all we ever have to build with). The people we love won’t be with us forever. The next great idea won’t come when called. But there’s always a new horizon (I love the ‘as her birds fall from the nest flying towards the great northwest’ lyric. Incredibly evocative, especially with the music). We may not always be able to see it, and there’s a playful acceptance of the absurd futility of trying to force it (the final comments about death), but there’s also a profound gratitude for it. There’s no way to systematize or control the things in your life that matter, and you can’t hold onto them forever. But we must celebrate them anyway, despite and perhaps because of this.
Infallible
Infallible is the clearest articulation of the idea that ran through Getaway and Mind Your Manners—namely that we do have the ability to challenge and confront a world falling apart, provided we embrace our own capacity for imagination—to allow ourselves to be inspired, to dream big, and to understand that the primary obstacle in our ways is ourselves. In many ways this is one of Pearl Jam’s oldest themes—the transformational power of people, but there’s a (not surprising) older gloss to the presentation. In the past there was almost an aesthetic sensibility to the message. The world needed to be transformed because the current arrangement was offensive. And there was an intense desire to have something to belong to—the pressing need for a world that didn’t alienate you. But that’s different on Lightning Bolt. Art composed by middle aged, wildly successful people with families will feel different. It will be about preserving what they’ve built, the stake they have, and the legacy they’ll be leaving for the people who will survive them. There will be a more explicitly optimistic tone (it only makes sense to read your own personal journey back onto the world—if I can create something lasting out of nothing we all can do it), and anxiety about failure. Before I had nothing to lose. When your music is about your own alienation you’ve already experienced the worst and you’re striving for something better. But once you have everything to lose the stakes become more tangible.
The music reflects that fear. The Lightning Bolt transition into Infallible cuts off what was going to be a soaring, transformative, emancipatory guitar solo and, rising from beneath, we get a martial, pounding, urgent (though not quite strident—the song isn’t going for that tone since it’s trying to persuade, rather than hector) warning. The music creeps up on us, almost stalking, calling to mind My Father’s Son and Lightning Bolt (and anticipating Pendulum)—songs about the fears we can never quite escape and ideas we cannot fully grasp. These can tear us apart if we let them, and the music in Infallible does sound like something falling apart that we scramble to put back together with nothing more than optimism and will (which the song believes is enough). The bridge is thoughtful and hopeful while resisting the urge to be overly showy. Instead of a full blown guitar solo we are instead asked to focus instead on the understated background vocals that remind us there’s a small role for everyone to play. And the song’s emotional climax runs headlong into a discordant wall, reminding us that there’s still much to do, and time is running out. It’s one of their more interesting musical compositions in a long time. The closest analogue in the catalog is probably Rival. It’s a musical vein I hope they continue to mine.
Eddie’s performance matches the song. The verses are an interesting juxtaposition of loud and quiet—Eddie shouting out a whisper, introducing a truth we may not want to hear, but not wanting to bludgeon us over the head with it. He takes steps to ensure we don’t run away like you would approaching an easily startled animal. And the juxtaposition with the go for broke chorus is effective, drawing the listener in and ensuring he has our attention before hammering the message home with the kind of larger than life commitment we rarely see anymore—though it is coming through the weathered pipes of an old campaigner rather than the youthful firebrand first picking up their sword and imagining that a better world comes from shouting loud enough.
It’s not that this sentiment is wrong. It’s just that Infallible understands we have to change something in ourselves—our own limited vision--before we’ll be receptive to that message. This is an old theme in pearl jam’s music, but one that they’ve continued to refine throughout the years. The title of the song is instructive. To be infallible is to have faith in the absolute truth of what you believe. Faith is the right word, because the assumption of infallibility cuts off dialogue, appeals to evidence, any possibility that you may be wrong. It shields you from calling your beliefs into question, answerable to nothing but your own conviction. And our current problem is our own sense of infallibility. Eddie keeps this vague, and you can read your own causes and concerns into it. Maybe it’s an attack on religion (which is an obvious target given the high correlation between religious faith and infallible certainty), but as I’ve argued throughout I think that’s far too narrow a read. In concert this song was sarcastically dedicated to Wall Street and other targets Eddie would identify as an enemy of change. You can easily attach your cause de jour and it’ll probably work.
But it’s really resistance to change that the song (as well as Getaway and Mind Your Manners before it) is grappling with. We just have the most explicit presentation in Infallible (though I think Mind Your Manners offers the most interesting and nuanced pass at this). We face a world in crisis whose magnitude is amplified (in Eddie’s eyes) by this new emphasis on legacy that comes from having children. It’s not that we’re ruining things for ourselves; it’s not the visceral aesthetic reaction to George Bush. It’s the price the next generation will pay for our actions. The opening lyrics reflect this.
Keep on locking your doors
Keep on building your floors
Keep on just as before
Pay disasters no mind
Didn't get you this time
No prints left at the crime
Our ships come in
And its sinking
The head in the sand accusation, the refusal to confront the long term costs of our actions (it didn’t impact me, I’m not directly responsible, therefore I don’t have to do anything about it). We get a call back to the opening lyrics in Getaway about ships sinking --a not quite apocalyptic vision that reflects the desire of the song to ease the listener in to the message, and one that also reflects the time horizons of the problem. Our ship has come in, we think we’ve made it, but we’re ignoring the fact that it simply isn’t sustainable.
And we get our first presentation of the chorus—optimistic, transformative, confident that there’s no problem we can’t fix if we can just focus our attention, imagination, and will towards it. We’re just too distracted, too afraid, too shackled by a deeply engrained sense of learned helplessness to do anything about it. Eddie’s phrasing is simple, declarative, and powerful—the presentation of an obvious truth that we’ve forgotten
Of everything that's possible
In the hearts and minds of men
Somehow it is the biggest things
That keep on slipping
Right through our hands
We have the first mention of the infallible lyric, and in this context the target is less an institution (religion, finance, government) and more ourselves. The infallible truth we need to challenge is one of two things: The belief that everything is fine, the status quo is sustainable, we can go on just as before without any consequences or (and these are not mutually exclusive) our own conviction that we’re so flawed and imperfect that there’s nothing we can do about it except watch it come crashing down on top of us. Lock your doors and hope for the best.
It’s a shame that we didn’t feel the necessary urgency or muster up the will to act until things got this bad. Maybe we needed the threat of an ending to compel us to try and make things better. But we can do better, we just better do it quickly. “Time we best begin, here at the ending”
The second verse makes the religious connection back to Getaway and Mind Your Manners, but also makes it clear that this isn’t really a song that’s attacking organized religion. It’s attacking the passivity that it can engender—the faith that someone else will solve the problems for us.
Put your faith in big hands
Pay no more than a glance
And that’s as much a political lesson as it is a spiritual one, learned the hard way during the Obama years—a response to the naïve faith of 2008 which believed that if you just elect a nice guy who promised hope and change and to not be George Bush that somehow the world would magically transform itself. The lesson learned was that the only way to make the world better is to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself (which is given a nice musical mirror in the bridge where we have a low, workman like background chant that invites you to add your voice in a small but meaningful way, rather than a larger than life expansive gesture). The verse continues, challenging the passivity that tells us that there’s nothing we can do to make things better, this is as good as it gets. And we may hear this from our leaders (it’s easy to imagine Eddie thinking of coal and oil lobbies opposing renewable energy as he writes this) but it’s directed just as much at us. The people who empower them by believing what they say.
The chorus repeats the same sentiment—as long as we trust in ourselves and our own capacity (think the end of Faithful but about society rather than relationships) we can leave behind something better. But that window is fast closing, and doing nothing is so tempting. It’s not for nothing that the song fades out with a warning….
Keep on locking your doors
Keep on building your floors
Keep on just as before
I was kicking around doing this over the summer anyway, since there's no way I'll have the time during the academic year.
