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| Song Meanings / Album concept / Art Work / Technical Stuff
Here's some meanings/information behind the songs from Vitalogy:
Pearl Jam, Vitalogy Album
In the liner notes of Vitalogy the childhood picture on the clown's lap is Beth (Eddie's wife) and in the liner notes as well the eyes and ear are from Eddie. "Vitalogy, Ed brought in that book, and we said man that would make a great album cover. We tried really hard, to make it like a book, kind of tipped it so it opened horizontally, which pissed off record stores: they had to put it in sideways. With the packaging, from Vs. on, we were trying to create something a bit more unique. It ended up costing us 50 cents or something, which we were so headstrong at the time on. I don't know if I'd do that again: give the record company 50 cents of my $1.50!", Jeff Ament. "Eddie had been carrying this book around with him; a self-help book from the '20s. What to do to be healthier. He loved this. We thought great: public domain book. No problem. We sent it down to our legal department and it turns out there are two or three different versions of Vitalogy, one of which was copyrighted. Now we had, in this war room, the two different Vitalogy versions printed out, the portions that the band wanted to use versus the two original texts. Lawyers reading over all three versions", Michele Anthony (Sony's Vice-President). "You know I always think of record packages as being like cereal boxes that you...you know, the cereal box you read when you eat your cereal as a kid or whatever, and that if you read this while you're listening to it, I think you'd get a real whole experience...and a kind of nice way to educate yourself on the issue", Eddie Vedder. "Vitalogy is not really a "solo" album. I don't think the songs demanded solos; it was more of a rhythmic album", Mike McCready. "There is some weird stuff on there. It came from being on the road; it was mostly recorded while we were on tour. We did a little bit at Bad Animals Studios in Seattle at the end of our Vs. tour, then some in New Orleans and some in Atlanta. They were songs we had been doing at soundcheck. Eddie had some old tunes, like "Better Man." Jeff had "Nothingman." Those songs mostly came just from jamming", Mike McCready. "Yeah, he [Eddie] plays a lot. He plays on "Better Man," "Not For You," and a couple of others. He plays a lot more live too. Having three guitars has added a whole new dimension to the band. He has this kind of punk rock way of playing, and Stone has this weird rhythm, and I do the leads, so it's opened up totally new doors", MIke McCready.
Pearl Jam, Vitalogy Album, 01 - Last Exit
"These are the words... to a new song... that no one has ever heard before. We uh, invented it last night (November 15th in New Orleans, 1993)... and I don't think Mike knows it but we're gonna play it anyways", Eddie Vedder. "Well, I heard a Talking Heads song today, and I was thinking about what a masterful songwriter David Byrne is and was, but more importantly how the band interacted, and how they seemed to grow over a period of the first five records. And I started thinking about how lately there's a lot of bands that get to a certain level, and it just stops. They scrap it. Compare this to, say, The Rolling Stones or The Who, where they just continued on forever and are still playing, or they quit after 20 years. But Talking Heads, or Jane's Addiction, or The Police, or even Nirvana you could say, got to a point and then that was just it. I was wondering what the difference was between the early bands and these bands. Maybe that's like the line from "Last Exit" [from Vitalogy] where it says, "no time to question why nothing lasts." I don't know if it's that there's a hundred magazines on the shelf compared to two, or that there's now a whole TV channel devoted to exposure. I don't know what it is that makes people not want to continue", Eddie Vedder.
Pearl Jam, Vitalogy Album, 02 - Spin the Black Circle
"That's me trying to do Johnny Thunder leads. I actually overdubbed those leads, but when I do it live, that riff is so hectic and frantic, I have to be warmed up or it sounds really shitty", Mike McCReady.
Pearl Jam, Vitalogy Album, 03 - Not for You
"I believe that's true -- that there is something sacred about youth, and the song is about how youth is being sold and exploited. I think I felt like I had become part of that too. Maybe that's why sometimes I have a hard time with the TV end of music and much of the media and the magazines. When I pick up a magazine, I just count how many pages of ads before the first article starts. You go one, two... up to fifteen to twenty or more. And then in the back you have phone sex ads. So I've pretty much had it. I don't want to be the traveling medicine show where we go out and do the song and dance and someone else drops the back of the wagon and starts selling crap. I don't want our music to sell anything -- or anyone else use it", Eddie Vedder. "Tom Petty sent me this amazing 12-string Rickenbacker, and 'Not For You' was the first time I used it. It was like a Christmas present. One day it just showed up at my door. I called him up and thanked him. But it's a cool song - an Eddie song", Mike McCready.
"Well, we're also touring a lot. We'd come home for a few days at a time,
go back for another two weeks, 10 weeks, two-and-a-half months. And I think that
when you play music that hard, giving all you have every night, travelling to
another place, setting up the circus again and really putting your head in the
lion's mouth, doing everything you could to make each show the best it could be,
I think after doing that, and then people whether they work with the record
company, press department, or they work with, let's say, a music channel or
something like that, and then they think the reason you were successful is
because of them, you'd say, FUCK you. What about all this, that we've done? It's
not that we want to take credit. That's fine. I don't care. I don't want credit,
it's not like I'm trying to claim that. But when they start acting like they own
you that they are the reason... that's something that's not true. These
attitudes out there that the music is theirs that it's the industry's music...
And it's not. It's mine. And it's yours. Whoever's listening to it. It's mine
and it's yours. And everybody in between, they're the distributors. I think that
something like a music channel can be very powerful. Sometimes they think
they're the ones who decide what's heard. I think that's a dangerous situation.
And, I think, what's more dangerous is that thy think it belongs to them. That's
probably what Not For You is about", Eddie Vedder.
Pearl Jam, Vitalogy Album, 04 - Tremor Christ
"'Tremor Christ' seemed to write itself. It was just a riff-and-a-half, basically. On a muggy, beautiful New Orleans afternoon we came into a very cool studio and it poured out", Stone Gossard. "We recorded "Tremor Christ" in a very short period, one night in New Orleans, and I remember what that night was like. I can see how the lights were turned down low. I can see the room. And so I like listening to that", Eddie Vedder. "I wrote part of that one. It's kind of an odd, marching Beatles tune. It's just a strange song. It was written in New Orleans. The groove reconciles itself after you get into it", Mike McCready.
Pearl Jam, Vitalogy Album, 05 - Nothingman
"Nothingman" is about a troubled relationship. Was that written before or after your marriage? I wrote it before. I might bring something I know from the relationship to "Nothingman," but I'm thinking about someone else going through it, someone who fucked up. I didn't fuck up. The idea is about if you love someone and they love you, don't fuck up... 'cause you are left with less than nothing", Eddie Vedder. "I can definitely listen to every song on the record and get something out of it. 'Nothingman' was written in an hour, and so I like listening to that 'cause it just happened and somehow captured a mood there, at least for me in the vocal. Any time I can nail down a song, a thought, in a half hour, that feels really good", Eddie Vedder. "'Nothingman' which Jeff wrote, were recorded a day apart. They were very spontaneous, but with a simple yet indescribably beautiful vibe to them", Stone Gossard.
Pearl Jam, Vitalogy Album, 08 - Corduroy
At the end of 'Corduroy', Eddie mumbles a few lines, "It's your move now. I thought you were a friend, but I guess I, I guess I hate you". "It is about a relationship but not between two people. It's more one person's relationship with a million people. In fact, that song's almost a little too obvious for me. That's why instead of a lyric sheet we put in an X-ray of my teeth from last January and they are all in very bad shape, which was analogous to my head at the time", Eddie Vedder.
Pearl Jam, Vitalogy Album, 09 - Bugs
"Before I went in the studio, I was walking around some little thrift shop, I found an accordion. And I went in with the accordion and played something, and then spoke some gibberish over the top. I remember laughing and saying, "That's the first single", Eddie Vedder. "Three years ago, this was so new to us. I think that it's almost confidence that enables us to record "Bugs" or confidence in our listeners that they can open up to something like that. Back then I had my mind on the business at hand, and I probably wouldn't have felt so free to take up two hours of studio time working on Eddie's wank-off accordion piece. For a long time after recording it, I was playing it for friends saying it was the best thing we'd ever done. [laughs] We just decided to do something that was fun to listen to and wasn't bombastic and wasn't everything that the band had become", Eddie Vedder.
Pearl Jam, Vitalogy Album, 10 - Satan's Bed
"That's another Stone song. The solo is definitely my tribute to Angus Young; I was trying to do my Angus thing. I'm sure Eddie won't like reading that", Mike McCready.
Pearl Jam, Vitalogy Album, 11 - Better Man
"I wrote "Better Man" before I could drink -- legally -- on a four-track in my old apartment", Eddie Vedder. "There are times like "Better Man," where you are creating a fictional character -- the way James Taylor does in, say, "Mill Worker," and working within the framework of someone else's head... That's really fulfilling because you feel like you are writing a story. Then there are other songs like "Not for You" where there's no doubt about where it's coming from. It's straight from inside you, and that's fulfilling too, because it's therapeutic", Eddie Vedder. "You know the truth. You know that you're just a normal guy. You know you're not even that good. You know that anybody could do what you're doing. The kind of writing I do now is like what I've always done. I really feel that way. I didn't have lessons. I just do something I like to do. Even that "Better Man" song that I wrote, I wrote 10 years ago sitting on my bed", Eddie Vedder.
Pearl Jam, Vitalogy Album, 13 - Immortality
"Immortality," he explains, was a look at his own delicate state of mind written in the days before Cobain's death. The cigar box is simply where Vedder often keeps his tapes. No, that was written when we were on tour in Atlanta. It's not about Kurt. Nothing on the album was written directly about Kurt, and I don't feel like talking about him, because it [might be seen] as exploitation. But I think there might be some things in the lyrics that you could read into and maybe will answer some questions or help you understand the pressures on someone who is on a parallel train...", Eddie Vedder.
Pearl Jam, Vitalogy Album, 14 - Hey foxymophandlemama
"I had taped something off the tv when I was maybe 17 or something and I think it was people who had mental problems who were being let out of the hospitals early because the states were taking away funding for mental hospitals so they were setting these folks out without the necessary care but it was still very intriguing the way their mind worked and what they would say and we experimented and tried to incorporate it into what to date is our most emotional and moving song", Eddie Vedder. "The only thing that worries me musically is that everything we put out is so under the microscope that it ends up seeping into the songs, and suddenly the music is bombastic just to be able to resist or survive the inspection. There are things on Vitalogy that are definitely not typical, so I'm trying to battle against that. There's two ways: You either give the people what they want, or you become cynical and that protects you", Eddie Vedder.
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