(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 26 June 2025 0:02, UK
Not every artist is looking to write a hit every time they sit down at the piano or pick up a guitar. Songwriting is always a personal matter for anyone who works in the field, and even if they have to give up a piece of themselves when writing their classics, it’s always worth it to find people who resonate with their music rather than keep all their pain inside. But Eddie Vedder wasn’t going to simply roll over when it came time for the record company to pick out some of their biggest singles.
Although Pearl Jam got a lot of flak back in the day for being too mainstream to be considered grunge, Vedder was almost anti-mainstream in many regards. He maintained that everything needed to be authentic when it came to his music, so when he heard a record come out of the mixing stages that sounded like every other stadium-rock act in the country, he was mortified when it started climbing the charts.
But Ten is far from a Poison record or anything. There’s a lot of reverb that’s a little too reminiscent of what turned up on other 1980s albums, but the songs are what matter the most, and tunes like ‘Alive’ and ‘Even Flow’ still have the same punch they had back in the day. There was a lot of potential, but MTV made one fatal mistake when they decided to blacklist the original video for ‘Jeremy’.
Despite being a fantastic work of art, people were horrified at a band calling attention to subjects as depressing as a child taking his life. Once it was edited against their wishes to look like “Jeremy” shot up a classroom of kids, Vedder was no longer interested in trying to play the game of MTV anymore. And considering how much money he was leaving on the table for ‘Black’, it wasn’t a decision he took lightly.
Many of the band’s subsequent videos were all performance footage, but Vedder said the band’s heartbreaking ballad was too good to go through the media machine, saying at the time, “Some songs just aren’t meant to be played between Hit Number Two and Hit Number Three. You start doing things, you’ll crush it. That’s not why we wrote songs. We didn’t write to make hits. But those fragile songs get crushed by the business. I don’t want to be a part of it. I don’t think the band wants to be a part of it.”
“Some songs just aren’t meant to be played between Hit Number Two and Hit Number Three. You start doing things, you’ll crush it. That’s not why we wrote songs.”
Eddie Vedder
The song had all the makings of being a classic track, but since it was about Vedder confronting a bitter breakup, he was far too attached to see everyone singing it. When it did get picked up via word of mouth, however, it was easy for people to relate to the song on its own merits than having the radio jam it down their throats, especially the ending of the track where Vedder lets loose with the vocals and sings about his other half having a beautiful life without him.
And looking at their career throughout the rest of the 1990s, Vedder carefully calculated how much he would leave to everyone’s imagination. First of all, no song on Vs. was ever going to be mistaken for Ten thanks to its dry production, and when the band returned to making music videos, they made sure they made a statement rather than served as a cash grab, like the strange animation for ‘Do The Evolution’.
Pearl Jam were already in the stratosphere thanks to their first singles, but ‘Black’ was never built to be that kind of vehicle. This was practically a therapy session that Vedder somehow managed to get onto the final track, and as much as he may have loved it, he wasn’t going to let his version of the song be hijacked by someone else.
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