Credit: Far Out / Spotify
Tue 29 September 2026 3:30, UK
When we talk about Pearl Jam’s genre-defining record Ten, it’s mainly positive, but Eddie Vedder didn’t want it to be as successful as it was.
Vedder has always been a very independent musician. The reason he was such a good fit for Pearl Jam was that he approached singing in a way his future band members had never heard before. Given that some of them had success beforehand with Mother Love Bone, they found that everyone who tried to join Pearl Jam was a carbon copy of their former singer, Andrew Wood, and that’s why they liked Vedder so much.
“My initial impression was, well, he can sing, and it sounds cool,” said Stone Gossard in 2016, “The only other things that I’d heard were from singers trying to be Andy, who were really into Mother Love Bone, so hearing Eddie was like, Thank God! I was like, low and clear… that’s pretty interesting. It was the first thing we heard that worked at all musically. So if you have a guy that sounded pretty good and he was into it, don’t screw around, just start making music. We were pretty quick to go, ‘Let’s just do it’.”
The first record that Pearl Jam wound up working on together was Ten, an album that is considered a grunge masterpiece to this day. It’s arguably one of the band’s greatest LPs, selling millions of copies and becoming one of the albums that clearly set the creative boundaries for grunge. While most people would be ecstatic with such success, Vedder was hesitant, as he thought a successful debut spelt out certain failure for some bands.
“I would love for everybody to listen to what we write, but I want it be a slow process,” he said, “I think it would be counter-productive for Ten to be a huge seller […] In order for people to get the most out of Pearl Jam, it has to be a slow growth. It does worry me that we will be a big success, and that our songs will be taken out of context. We are not user-friendly.”
He was worried about Pearl Jam becoming a huge success and then suddenly having to reel out similar hits and fit a certain mould. Lord knows that plenty of bands have fallen victim to these kinds of pitfalls before, as people begin to expect a certain sound from them after a while. The moment such bands begin to deviate from this assigned image and sound, people stop listening.
There are a lot of bands that this has happened to, but the one that Eddie Vedder specifically wanted to avoid becoming was The Monkees. He recalled that their image in the mainstream was so driven by the media that the minute they started trying to write their own songs or inject some more creativity into their style, they were restricted from doing so.
Further reading: From The Vault
You can tell that Pearl Jam tried to steer clear of such a categorisation, as despite being a band which headline festivals and sell out arenas, they also stay away from mainstream media. Eddie Vedder has said that this was all intentional to stop themselves from being labelled a specific way and going down a similar path The Monkees did.
“It’s to the audience’s credit that they stuck with us,” he said, “We couldn’t have done any of it without them. And I think it’s happened before. Maybe even with the Monkees. You know the Monkees wanted to play on their record and they wanted to play their own songs, and no one ever heard that record. I think bands have done it and tried before, but I kind of think that we were just fortunate.”
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