Aside from watching copious amounts of sports, one of my favorite hobbies is listening to music for people at least twice my age. I sometimes get quite passionate about this.
A band like Pearl Jam gives that passion a little extra juice, not just because of their studio output (which is at points inconsistent but overall quite strong) but perhaps even moreso for their live performances. I have seen Pearl Jam two times, and it feels like I have barely dipped my toe into the pool. They vary their setlists greatly from night to night, digging up deep cuts, spanning their whole catalog, and slipping two or three covers into almost every set. The live experience is essential to one's relationship with most artists they love, but Pearl Jam does take it to a higher level.
From the beginning, fans traded bootleg tapes to spread the gems they were lucky enough to hear in exchange for something they missed. In response, starting with their tour promoting Binaural, the band has released practically every concert they have played since 2000. Your favorite Pearl Jam recording is probably out there on YouTube or Spotify or as an eBay listing, waiting for you to find it.
I think a lot about "dream" setlists for my favorite artists, whether they are young or old or dead, and Pearl Jam provides the best fodder for such an exercise. They have plenty of songs that are dear to me and have established an adventurous enough ethos that just about any fan-authored setlist would get a warm reception from the audience.
With that in mind, I have concocted a pair of Pearl Jam setlists — 26 songs each, no repeats — meant to be played over the course of two nights. I made a few concessions to convention, dropped a few favorites that have apparent reasons to never be played again (sorry, "Falling Down" and Buddy Holly's "Everyday"), dropped a few others because they didn't fit anywhere, and made it a rule to include on each night at least one song from every album the band has released. With those requirements, I still aimed for the kind of shows I would want to see.
Night 1
Set 1
1. "Release" (Ten, 1991)
Let's get one thing out of the way: Ten is the best Pearl Jam album. It is also the Pearl Jam album that least interests me. Five of the band's seven most-played songs are from Ten, and another three have been played more than 200 times each. They have to check a few of these boxes every night, which removes a lot of intrigue and takes away space that could be given to something more novel. Ten is the most "Pearl Jam"-sounding release to people who don't listen to Pearl Jam, the album whose songs you are by far most likely to hear on the radio on any given day, the album that introduced me to the band because "Even Flow" was on Guitar Hero III and the CD was buried in my Pearl Jam-ambivalent parents' cabinet. I have not heard every song on Ten in concert yet and am extremely comfortable with that.
While there will not be many songs from Ten on these setlists, there will be some, and not just because there must be. "Release," my favorite song on the album, makes the cut. What makes it — and other sad, slow-building songs in Pearl Jam's repertoire — such an excellent opener is its blend of the anguished and anthemic. In concert, it is like a hymn, with the audience finding one voice to confess their pain to the skies.
2. "Animal" (Vs., 1993)
Initially, I had a quieter song here, but after opening with an exorcism, the crowd will not stand for an immediate descent. Spirits are high. We need something loud and visceral. Fortunately, Vs. contains the best songs in the "loud and visceral" category of Pearl Jam's discography. "Animal" will do just fine.
3. "Wreckage" (Dark Matter, 2024)
In Pearl Jam's fourth decade together, they face a difficult philosophical question: What do we want Pearl Jam to be? Other rock artists in their "legacy act" period have faced it before, especially after losing a member. On rare occasions, you get a hard left turn before the afterlife, like David Bowie's Blackstar, and some artists find ways to reinterpret their past selves and put out something surprisingly fresh, like Rush's Clockwork Angels. And many — particularly in metal — fail to evolve, putting out milquetoast, bloated albums that fit alongside their hits but do not quite connect the same way.
Dark Matter, produced by Millennial dad-rock enthusiast Andrew Watt, does not provide a tidy answer to that question. The album presents no challenges the listener, with a few stock rockers and some instances of overt homage to what Pearl Jam was at their peak. Take "Wreckage," a song whose jangly riff draws from "Daughter" and "Falling Down" and whose chorus is pure 90s power-pop chum.
Yet from the first moment I heard it, "Wreckage" became my favorite song off Dark Matter, and it is a major reason the album is the band's best since at least Backspacer. Am I a sucker? Does it matter? I genuinely am not sure. While Pearl Jam will be a far less interesting band if future albums are so tinged with nostalgia, I cannot deny the effect it had on their most recent release.
