What Dark Matter Means to Me and Hard to Imagine at Fenway
The last seven years has been a whirlwind. From a mental breakdown to new homeowner. From the cusp of divorce to the strongest time in all of our 15 year marriage. From having $8 in my pocket at Dollar Tree knowing I can only get 8 items for my kids to a resurrected career and an unexpectedly successful side business. And like most times in my life, Pearl Jam has been there for almost all of it.
I say “almost” because my downward spiral 7 years ago into a broken and defeated shell of myself was one of the only times where that music not only couldn’t do anything for me, but I wouldn’t LET it do anything for me. I didn’t want it to. I wanted to run away from everything permanently. I wanted to give up. Pearl Jam wasn’t the only music I avoided during that time, but they were surely the most prominent.
As a bullied and outcasted teenager, there were times where they were the only thread I felt I had to hang onto. For as much as others took away from me, that was the one piece I never let anyone take. I may have been desperate for acceptance from my peers and to feel like I fit in somewhere, but it wasn’t coming at the cost of abandoning the music that had been my best friend when I had no other friend to lean on.
Over the years my fandom has been pretty consistent, although admittedly a mixture of elements certainly had left me less excited for new music. Backspacer and Lightning Bolt never connected with me on the whole, and a seven year wait for another album was not exactly fun. 2020’s Gigaton, released just as lockdowns started, was a welcome return to form of sorts.
To be honest, if this year’s release of Dark Matter had only matched Gigaton in quality, I still would have considered it a win for a band thirty years into their career. How many bands truly release great albums after 30 years? To get a “pretty good” album at that point is a resounding success.
But as my wife and I sat in a dark movie theater to listen to the album for the first time in the dark in April, I couldn’t help but feel like the album was in many ways describing my journey from September of 2017 to now. Pearl Jam’s music has always been about finding hope and that theme has reverberated with me for 30 years. But I was not in any way prepared for them to so succinctly sum up everything I had felt over the last seven years.
Was cleared for lift off, aborted my take off…a date with the gallows and a reprieve not looking likely – Running
I’d open the door, I’d let you in, I would open it if you came…Can you heal? Can you feel the change in my heart? – Won’t Tell
I apologize…Help to Carry Me Home – Upper Hand
The day everything came out, I sat in my car on top of the Piscataqua Bridge (which connects New Hampshire and Maine high over the Piscataqua River), ready to take a flying leap. Time had run out on me. I felt like I had never had the “Upper Hand”, and so while I’m so sorry about the timing, I had to go. My cell phone kept ringing and the caller just showed as “Sweets,” the nickname I’ve always had for my wife. I didn’t want to answer because I didn’t want to have to explain. But in the end, I opened that door, I let her in. I needed to be able to heal, I needed to change. If I couldn’t put my trust in her, who could I trust? She all but literally carried me home from the top of the bridge that day. I had to shed the false skin I had been wearing for 3 months, and she had to allow me (a lot more than) a bit of grace. For a song about a dream, Won’t Tell certainly sounds a lot like my very real life in early December 2017.You're hurting yourself, it's plain to see, I think you're hurting yourself just to hurt me – Scared of Fear
Visited by thoughts….that I no longer give a fuck who is wrong and who’s right – Wreckage
We could be fighting together instead of fighting ourselves – React, Respond
It’s strange these days when everybody else pays for someone else’s mistake – Dark Matter
Once I was home, there had to be hard discussions. Hard admissions. Hard truths. When you’re suffering a mental break, you don’t think clearly. You have a very myopic view that is at once distorted but truthful. Many aren’t lucky enough to ever see the distortion. Thankfully, I eventually did.
My wife would have had every right to leave me based on everything that had happened. The mistakes I had made were mine, but everybody else was paying for them too. Part of my start to healing was understanding the cost of those mistakes. Once I came clean to my wife about the struggles I had been having, how close I had been to the edge, she had to “comb thru the wreckage,” looking for the man she once knew. Together we had to overcome, swim through the waves, and decide to be more powerful as one than we are apart.
You can be loved by everyone, and not feel love
Conquer the fear you are what you’re not
Hear your own voice rising - Waiting for Stevie
I spent the next few years dissecting myself; to say I had to tear myself apart completely in order to rebuild a new version of myself is putting it mildly. Anxiety and self doubt can be crippling but you are not alone. The joy and passion of music can inspire, that finding “yourself in the song” and “hear(ing your) own voice rising” can be one of the most empowering things we can feel as human beings. You are not alone, these things are all communal, can be shared in, and overcome. Just as I had shunned music in the midst of my madness, it was now an essential part of my healing.
You’re the one and only you – Something Special
As the storm started to pass, and as time went on, I took joy in watching my kids grow into amazing humans. This ode to fatherhood encapsulates so much of what I’ve felt as a dad, especially as one graduated high school, and the other 2 got ready to advance into high school and middle school.
Healing was slow but consistent. We rebuilt our relationship and our bond. We took trips and explored for the first time in ages, seeing Seattle and Chicago. I started freelancing on the side which turned into a lucrative side hustle. And my wife found answers to some of the questions that had been burning inside of her for literal decades. Things were truly good. Comfortable. And then…the phone call came.Together, you and me, can take on anyone – Got to Give
Almost one year ago, I received a call from my landlord telling us that due to a cash crunch, he was going to sell our house we had rented for close to the last decade and we had to be out in roughly 45 days. Panic set in, questions rushed in. Where would we go? How will we find a new place in this market? How will this affect our kids, especially our oldest going into his senior year of high school? All of this could have created a new mental health crisis.
Instead, my wife and I got together, and took the challenge head on.
We decided to try and strike a deal with our landlord to see if he’d sell it to us directly, before it hit the open market. He agreed.
Over 56 days, we scrambled and fought and clawed. I leveraged part of my side business for a full year. We got together every dime we could. We made minor repairs to ensure the bank/FHA evaluation would go through and not fail (don’t get me started on the “chipped paint” rule). We ran around like chickens with our heads cut off getting everything into place. And we pulled it off. From 0 to homeowners in 56 days (8 weeks on the dot). Somehow, something we had been working towards accomplishing for years, that always somehow fell short, had happened. In 56 days. With no notice. We were homeowners.
The refrain on Got to Give quoted above may be out of context, but it completely describes the biggest lesson we have learned over the last 7 years. We COULD take on anyone or anything, TOGETHER.
We could become one last Setting Sun – Setting Sun
“Setting Sun” is as powerful of an album closer as Pearl Jam has ever had, which is saying something when that puts it in the rarified air of songs like “Release” and “Indifference.” It is at once a summation of the themes of the record and a summation of the last seven years of my life. My wife and I had to come to hard realizations, process a million different feelings, love, heal and find redemption. I just needed to see what she saw then. I’m glad I did.
Things were different then…all is different now…I tried to explain…somehow…
“Hard to Imagine” may not be on Dark Matter, but there is no song that more perfectly sums up how I feel about the last seven years of my life. Seven years ago I was having a mental health breakdown, without a job, swirling the drain, wanting a permanent way out, having horrible thoughts. On September 15th and 17th this year, I will be in the middle of center field of Fenway Park, with my wife, watching the band that has had such an incredible impact on my life and almost every element in it. I am now a homeowner, a business owner, and I have never felt more connected to my wife or more comfortable in my own skin as I am now. Things surely were different then, and things surely all are different now. This was my attempt to explain, somehow.
But in the end, it’s all just… Hard to Imagine.
Don’t Give Up.