“Every time I get me some it gets the best of me,” Eddie Vedder cries out on “The Speed of Sound,” the ninth track on Pearl Jam’s new album Backspacer.
Nine is an important number for the grunge-rock band from Seattle.
It’s the bands ninth studio album, released in the ninth month in the year 2009.
Most importantly, track nine is the band’s most concentrated and most personal song on the album, definitely a must have for fans and newcomers alike.
The song’s lyrics, as well as most of those on Backspacer, focus on dark themes such as regret, loss, anguish and reflection.
Songs such as “Sound” and the bands first single called “The Fixer” encompass all of these themes, beautifully playing on using the lyric “speed of sound” as a metaphor for the speed of life, which from the subject’s point of view is too fast paced.
Ironically most of the tracks on Backspacer are slowed down.
Vedder combines the slower rhythm that he used when he masterfully created the soundtrack for 2007 film “Into the Wild” with the gritty lyrics that made songs such as “Alive” and “Jeremy” the anthems for aggression and misfortune in the 1990’s.
But in a band where the theme of despair is ever so evident, a newfound source of inspiration seems to be bringing about some change.
In the powerfully inspirational song “Against the Waves,” Vedder and guitarist Stone Gossard write, “If not for love, I would be drowning I’ve seen it work both ways.” Vedder proudly screams “I gotta say it now” about his discovery of love, because he has seen it go both ways.
An example of this is “Black,” Pearl Jam’s notoriously most depressing and grueling song, off of 1991’s Ten.
Vedder writes about a broken-hearted man, screaming intensely at the near end of the song, “I know you’ll be a sun in somebody else’s sky but why can’t it be mine.”
This pain of heartbreak has been persistent throughout the band’s 19 years mainly, because all of the band members can relate to it.
As the years have passed by and Pearl Jam has stripped off its classic flannel shirt, jean shorts and boots style into wearing something more appropriate to their level of maturity.
The lyrics of Backspacer project that the band is will always be looking back to torment of the past, but as the subject of “Against the Waves” proclaims the band now is “Riding high amongst the waves” and “feels like [they] have a soul that has been saved.”
In “The Fixer” Vedder screams, “if something’s old, I wanna put a bit of shine on it.”
Mission accomplished. Backspacer shines bright.
Although the sound is varied from ‘90’s Pearl Jam, the lyrics of all the songs on Backspacer are reminiscent of the bands most popular album to date, Ten.
One thing is for sure listening to Backspacer, Vedder has put a shine on what is the essentialness of Pearl Jam—raw emotion—and once again it comes out sparkling.
