A Guided Tour of Lightning Bolt: (through Lightning Bolt)
Dr. Stip Zoidberg
Posts: 251
Hi all,
I've posted a few of these guided tours here before--extended essays on the music and lyrical themes on a particular pearl jam album. I'm in the middle of writing one on Red Mosquito forum, and I figured I'd post it here as well for anyone interested. There's a lot of great discussion happening at http://forums.theskyiscrape.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=6314&p=555137#p555137 if you care to join us. Comments, feedback, and other insights are always welcome--there or here
I'm trying to get through 2 songs a week, so this will take a while.
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?
I've posted a few of these guided tours here before--extended essays on the music and lyrical themes on a particular pearl jam album. I'm in the middle of writing one on Red Mosquito forum, and I figured I'd post it here as well for anyone interested. There's a lot of great discussion happening at http://forums.theskyiscrape.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=6314&p=555137#p555137 if you care to join us. Comments, feedback, and other insights are always welcome--there or here
I'm trying to get through 2 songs a week, so this will take a while.
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?
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Comments
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.
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]
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[/i]
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]
I caught myself believing
That I needed God
And if it's out there somewhere
We sure could use hymn now[/i]
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.
(cont. in next post)
[i]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[/i]
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.
[i]Go to heaven
That's swell
How you like your living (in) Hell?[/i]
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.
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. 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 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.