Crafting My "Dream" Two-Night Pearl Jam Setlist

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.

My 75 Favorite Rush Songs

My favorite music writer, Steven Hyden, has gotten into ranking various artists' best songs over the last few years. He's gotten to some artists whose work I really love. However, he has not yet gotten to my favorite artist of all-time: Rush. Inspired, I decided that I was going to put out my own list before he could.

Hyden really should have beaten me by this point. I first started putting together this blog post in the fullness of the pandemic and have only gradually pieced it together since 2020. I'd pick it up for a short while once I finally knew what to say about a song or three, and then I'd put it back on the shelf for weeks or months at a time. Then I'd decide to scrap what I'd written about one song and start over, and that would take at least 20 minutes. In other words, this process has been drawn out for a while.

This isn't the first time I've written about Rush on the internet, though. I did so plenty when I was younger, usually in Facebook notes, or even once for my high school newspaper. A big project like this, something approaching my final word, was going to happen at one point or another. Because while several other bands I listened to in my youth are not as important to me as they were then, Rush is a band I continue to hold dear. Even as other artists have become the subject of my fervor, and I look forward to hopefully decades of attending those artists' shows and seeing them evolve, this one still offers me regular comfort. There is not any musical act that I have thought more about in my life, even though their final performance was nearly a decade ago.

In the interest of time, I won't say much more before starting. Just note that this is about favoritism at least as much as quality, if not moreso. I've been ranking Rush's songs for years, because I am that kind of person, but that exercise has evolved. Only in the last few, though, have I ranked so many songs and used a spreadsheet for that purpose, and the exact spots are always changing. Give it a few months, and they'll be different again. Constant change is here to stay, et cetera.

We begin.

An Exercise in Resurrection: Crafting My Dream Stevie Ray Vaughan Setlist

Recently, at the invitation of a friend, I saw a Stevie Ray Vaughan tribute at a West Bank bar. It was an up-and-down, but ultimately enjoyable enough, night with plenty of skilled guitarists playing the work of Dallas' best musical export and one of my all-time favorite artists.

Of course, there were some moments where I was reminded that I was not watching Vaughan himself – mainly on the vocal side, since he had such a powerful and distinctive voice that perfectly fit his brand of blues rock. Anyone would sound underwhelming by comparison.

I've told friends before, and I still believe, that if I could bring back any one musician that died prematurely for a one-off show, it would be either Keith Moon or Stevie Ray Vaughan. In the interest of serving the latter fantasy, and of relating to my tribute show experience, I present my ideal setlist for a Vaughan resurrection concert.

As said in the Iron Maiden iteration of this exercise, the rules to which I hold myself are straightforward: The setlist must be roughly the same length as what the artist would typically do. On his last tour, Vaughan played 14 or 15 songs, so we'll do 15. I can pick whatever songs I want (as long as he played or recorded it at least once) and choose their order, though my hypothetical setlist doesn't necessarily have to match a list of my 15 favorite songs he recorded. I try to include a good mix of standards and B-sides, and I try to avoid redundancies.

With everything properly introduced, let's get on with it.

The 52 Albums I Listened to in 2017, Part III: 10-1

Below are the best 10 albums I listened to in 2017. If you want the other 42, they can be found here (with proper context) and here. Let's get right to it.

The 52 Albums I Listened to in 2017, Part II: 31-11

I listened to 52 albums in 2017's 52 weeks. In my previous post, I explained everything and began my rankings and reviews of them. Here are numbers 31 through 11. From here on out, I include my two favorite songs from each album.

The 52 Albums I Listened to in 2017, Part I: 52-32

In April, two of my friends constructed, with much assistance from the internet, a list of 365 albums they were going to listen to in as many days. Many, but not all, were considered classics. Some were just albums they wanted to cross off their personal lists. With a few exceptions though, neither of them had heard any albums on the list before, so the whole thing was meant to be an exercise in music self-education. For each album they listened to, they provided ratings, their favorite songs, and brief reviews, which were contained in a lengthy Google spreadsheet.

They asked if I wanted in on this. I told them I had no intention of doing the whole 365, but I agreed to pick those on the list that interested me or that I heard were essentials.

The idea worked longer than you might expect, with one friend filling almost all his cells in the spreadsheet into early August and the other giving his ratings and reviews here and there, but when school started, it became harder to keep up with the list, and the thing just kind of faded away.

However, I kept selectively participating, and on my own, I started listening to other albums I'd heard or read about, or which otherwise got my attention.

I don't pretend to know exactly how many albums I tend to average in a year, but by late November, I started to think that I had to have listened to more than whatever that average was. I created my own spreadsheet where I listed and ranked all the albums I had listened to since the beginning of 2017, and, noticing I was not far away from 50, decided to make that my new goal. When, with a couple weeks left, I reached 50, I got the idea to add on a couple more.

So, I can say that in 2017, I listened to 52 albums in 52 weeks. (Hardly 365 in 365 days, but it's something.) Beginning below, I ranked and reviewed each of those 52 albums. Some I actively sought out, and some I happened to be in the room and heard.

I've divided them into three groups: the top 10; and then the top and bottom halves of the rest. Here is the bottom half, numbers 52 through 32.

An Exercise (Somewhere) in Time: Crafting my Dream Iron Maiden Setlist

Friday, I see one of my favorite groups and (I would argue) the greatest metal band ever, Iron Maiden. I am prepared for something resembling a religious experience, as the Maiden live experience is renowned as one of the most electric imaginable. I have watched and listened to enough live performances secondhand to know their ability to engage an entire crowd and entertain like few others can, so I am obviously quite ready to finally witness their showmanship myself.

Something I like to do, especially in anticipation of one of the few concerts I have seen in my life, is create “dream” setlists for my favorite artists. Most are restricted to a Notepad file, with no reason to share them with more than a couple of people, but as I have done with Rush (pre-blog), I will now go through what songs would comprise my ideal Iron Maiden show.

The rules are simple: the set must be around their usual length (in this case, 17 songs); and even if I wanted otherwise, the handful of songs that are guaranteed for every performance must be part of the set. The rest is up to me, although it should be said these aren’t necessarily my favorite 17 Iron Maiden songs. I can’t really begin to narrow down that list, and I want to have some diversity. Some fantastic crowd songs, for example, were cut because if you include all of them, it becomes redundant. And if I were to include all my favorite B-sides just to have a unique experience, I wouldn’t have room for the even slightly more popular songs.

I will now begin.