​I'm pretty much precisely the right age to love Pearl Jam, and understand why some others don't. I was fourteen when Ten came out, Vs seemed to come out immediately after, and had a different feel, then Vitalogy. They released three albums while I was in high school, and I loved all three, and convinced the record store I was working for that we should do a midnight opening for the release of No Code. It was not a huge success. But I still loved the band. 

They faded out of my interest in the 21st century with less frequent albums, and less-focused writing. Their music sounded blander to me for a few years, returned to interesting, and then disappeared completely from my radar.

When the first track from their impening release showed up on Youtube, I was excited. I'm a little less excited with their second pre-release single, but I'm intrigued to see what they do with this album. In that spirit, I decided it was time to give a bit of a primer for people who loved the band but lost track, or people who are curious why so many GenXers still care about a grunge band in 2020.

The first album is way extended. I owned all the singles from the album, with all the B-Sides. I bought a bunch of Pearl Jam Bootlegs from record stores, including the legendarry Bad Radio Sessions of Eddie Vedder.  I certainly haven't included all the material from that era. No weeping original version of "Betterman" or the Oh So 1991 "Bee Girl" song. But they had some fun non-album tracks, ad some interesting outtakes from Temple Of The Dog (which would be on my Chris Cornell discography, not Pearl Jam's).

This album is my version of a story hinted at by Vedder's lyrics. It starts from the idea of the song / video for "Jeremy" but takes it in different directions. It's not a story I would consider writing now. It's peak Angsty Teen In The 90s. But that was the album Ten. It was so suicidal. So contemplative. So what happens next. So the problems in my life aren't women's faults, and yet women and fathers are at the crux of them. 

The bookending of this album is pretty essential to how I hear albums, and how I reorganize them. So I have preserved Once as the opening track, with it's slow climbing intro before the guitars crash in. If you want to read Vedder's story of the songs on this album, there are plenty of articles. That's not what I'm going to do here. This is a reimagining based on his lyrics. This opening track is our narrator, a teenager absolutely at the end of his tether. He's looking for anything to latch on to and get himself under control, but it is not happening. It's not hard to imagine the angry destructive sequences a video for this song would have.

There's a lot on this kid's mind as he gets on the bus to school, and he and his friends (not all sociopaths are loners) joke around about Dirty Frank the bus driver, saying that he's a serial killer and probably a cannibal. They don't seem to suspect what the main character of this story is up to.

State Of Love & Trust was one of the first Pearl Jam songs I heard, as it was on the Singles Soundtrack that my roommate and I each bought. It's how I was introduced to Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, The Smashing Pumpkins, Chris Cornell, Soundgarden, and Screaming Trees. The narrator is thinking of the awful things he's done, and listening to the voice inside (his) head. He's considering ending his own life instead of going through with massacring his school.  And he decides to live.

One of the voices that helps him get through the situation is from a girl he met when he was briefly institutionalized. He doesn't even know what her name is. They talked once. She told him about being abused by her father, and how when she lashed out, her mother had her committed. How her mother wants her to "get better" and go home, but Why Go back, knowing she'l just be abused again? She decides her version of  "getting better" will be different. Neither he nor we ever find out what happens to her. But he loved her, and imagines being with her again, and that keeps him moving forward.

"Why Go" fades beautifully into Black on both the original album, and this reimagining.  Here the narrator imagines a romantic encounter with the girl from "Why Go", and gets flustered. So he goes outside to get some fresh air to clear his head. But it doesn't quite work, as he remembers that the second time he saw her, she didn't acknowledge him, and he doesn't know why.

Wash is still walking outside. Still thinking. Still wishing. Still will he. Still won't he. Still hormonal response to girl he doesn't really know, and yet knows her most intimate secret. Still isn't sure anything he's ever done is right. Still. Still.

Still walking. He reaches the school's Garden. How has he not run into everyone on his little walk around the school? How is he still thinking about this girl who probably hasn't thought of him in months? He decides the way back to her is violence. And he heads back towards the school. 

He reaches the Porch and uses a payphone (Hey, it's 1991 here), and checks the messages on his machine (ibid). There are none. He decides he's going to go for it. Go into the school and make the news.

But he doesn't. The crux of this idea. The crux of the album. The video that changed how seriously kids myage watched videos was Jeremy, and in that video an abused kid decides to bring weapons to school and ends up killing himself in front of his horrified class. Things happen differently there. Our narrator isn't Jeremy, but he's in class with him. And they're not friends. But they're similar people. Only this Jeremy doesn't kill himself, but reads a story about killing himself in front of his class. I can't imagine that won't, at least, end up with him in the guidance counselor's office. He's not our concern, though. Jeremy goes off to live his best life. Meanwhile, the teen we've been following decides not to do anything. Today. Tomorrow is not a promise. But today, everybody lives. Nobody has to know what he never quite planned.

The kid goes back to the porch after class, debates whether it would be worth getting in trouble if he smoked a cigarette, and decides against it. He's thinking about that girl again. He's imagining them meeting outside of the hospital. A beach would be great. Yellow Ledbetter has him pndering whether (he's) the boxer or the bag.

He writes her off. In his head, of course. In real life, there's no real way to write off someone who probably hasn't thought of him. He grabs a bus, not a school bus, a city bus, to the beach to blow off some steam, and to Not Be Home. He needs to be on the beach so he can't hear her voice or her Footsteps in his head anymore. Instead, he ends up with the voice of his hospital assigned therapist talking to him. He confessed things to her that he wishes he hadn't but she'd been kinder than anyone else in the hospital. Still, she'd reported some things back to his family that he wishes she hadn't.

He walks into The Ocean to be dramatic. Not suicide dramatic. Floating in the ocean dramatic. Thinking about her again dramatic. But it's deliberate now. It's not voices. It's not hoping for any actualization. He's just drifting, and letting his mind unravel.

When I was in high school, my roommate had a mixtape from a friend called Windowsills. It was songs to listen to while being melodramatic and dreaming out a window. There were many references to suicide. And, while not being suicidal at all myself, I asked a bunch of people on my floor, what song made them think of suicide. That this didn't get me sent to a therpaist myself is remarkable. Deep was on my mix because it even references windowsills. For the purpose of this album, the kid is still in the ocean, diving down and swimming under water for as long as his breath holds. Then gasping back up into the air.

Breath is not about the gasping in the ocean. But about going home. About having skipped the last half of school and being pretty sure his horrid parents know. It's about it now being past curfew and his not having even done anything bad. No violence. No alcohol. He didn't even smoke. Just cut classes to calm himself, and take a dip in the ocean. And then he just walked home instead of taking a bus.

We leave him at the door, and see his father's view of the day Alone. His girlfriend has left him. Just like his wife left him. Because he's awful. And he knows he's awful. And he knows he's a lousy father. And he was an awful husband. And he might just be a awful person. And he walks around the town, and the beach, the same way his son did. And he saw him cutting class. And he saw him doing nothing destructive. And he went home. And he got there first. And he's just as suicidal.

The story that the teenager told the therapist? He knows that his father is not his father. That the guy that's been poorly raising him is just some guy his mother married. Some guy that was better than his real father was. That his real father is no longer Alive, that he will never get a reconciliation there. He remembers the conversation with his mother. How she left. How she left him with the man who doesn't know how to raise him.

The album ends here as the original album ends. Though I don't like how it flows out of "Alive", Release brings us to the kid sitting on a windowsill. (Which once again gets referenced in the song.) Once agan, he's considering suicide. He's considering the legacy of his dead father. He's considering the legacy of the man who's raising him. He's considering the mother who left, the stepmother who left, the father who left, the acting father who he wishes would leave. We don't get an answer about what happens to any of these people. We fade out to credits. Because it was the nineties, and everything was edgy and ambiguous, and dark. 

I respect the hell out of a good novelty band or artist. I was fourteen when my mother tried to convince me not to waste my money on Right Said Fred's album Up. When I first started hosting potry slams, the prize I gave to the last place finishers was a copy of the MC Skat Kat album. You know, the cartoon who danced with Paula Abdul in the "Opposites Attract" video. I love and fully support Weird Al Yankovic's near half-decade career of weird. But.

But I can't listen to their music for too long. I haven't been able to listen to a full Yankovic album since probably the same year I bought into Right Said Fred. I'll occasionally hear and appreciate a new song by him, but I don't need to hear it again, or buy the album. Even the old albums that I loved and owned when I was younger.

In many ways, They Might Be Giants is a novelty band. Their music is often fun, often weird, and sometimes written specifically for children or commercials. But, unlike other bands of their style, I do find myself wanting to sit down and listen to a full album of their work. But.

But I don't like how they're structured. This is especially true of Apollo 18, which concludes with twenty-one  songs between seven and thirty seconds. The brief songs are great, but, if they had to be grouped together, I'd rather have them at the beginning, as though you were flipping through commercials to get to the rest of the album. That's not what I've chosen to do here, though. Instead I've used those "Fingertips" songs to bridge the other tracks on the album. I think it gives the whole thing more cohesion, while maintaining some of the weird. I hope you appreciate it as much as I do.

Start your space dreams young. Dream moongrab. Dream starwish. Dream astronaut. Dream aliens. Get your dreams into some science. Make your wishes improbably possible. Reach for stars. See The Constellations (I Walk Along Darkened Corridors). Rock out with your meteorite out. Dance a comet tail. Do that thing all teenagers do, where they imagine the citylights are constellations. Don't be original. Be a fun, familiar, weird. Not offputting. Celestial. This is such a fun mantra filled declaration of teenage wont. Grab it. Dance it around your room.

Some day mother will die, and I'll get the money. I Palendrome I (Hey Now Everybody) continues the weird. It's an insectile guitar. It's chirpy percussion. It's a chorus of crickets singing about snakes. I wish I could call it a lunar luau, but it's too cold. Too dancing in the vacuum of space. There's barely any air in this song, so don't waste any time breathing.

It's all sci-fi in here as My Evil Twin (Who's That Standing At My Window) has a touch of brass  in its montagey and only slightly sinister keyboards. I wish this was somewhere in the Leslie Nielsen movie Naked Space (aka The Creature Wasn't Nice), a movie which terrified me when I was six.

Death is twangy. Death is punk background vocals. Death is wonk organs. Every time you call my name / I hear the angels sing.  Death is Dig My Grave (Come On Wreck My Car). Death is two mercifully short songs stitched together.

Everything comes down a notch. Dirgey. Circus dirgey. Bass-lickey. If I Wasn't Shy (All Alone),  is a series of humdrum confessions that sound decreasingly fantastical. But you just want to snap your fingers to this tune, as you slowly walk down a darkened alley.

Muppet vocals. George Takei promises. Superhero snippet song. Ohhhhhh.  Spider (I've Found A New Friend) is  the kind of bizarre that would have seemed right at home on Queen's soundtrack to The Flash.

Leave Me Alone (Which Describes How You're Feeling All The Time) brings that circus vibe back. A carousel of conflcting constant feelings. Blissful nausea.  Solipsism. Relgious questioning. Everything vague. But in rhyme. Which describes how you're feeling all the time. Ehhh.

The intro is straight out of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Particularly Columbia from the Official Sountrack. And then, Brad takes the vocals for a song about The Fifty  Foot Woman. (Someone Grab A Hold Of Me) She's Actual Size. It's a lovely sci-fi romp with a prominent brass section.

(Mysterious Whisper) The Statue Got Me High is a climb not a trip. It's scrambling atop the fifty foot woman. The monumantal woman.  The atomosphere explodes.

(Who's That Knocking On My Door) Hypnotist Of Ladies infers that maybe that monumental woman used to be an actual woman, but she was hypnotized by some gross dude who is charming, but otherwise no damned good.  

If you're looking for more narrative in your TMBG songs, look no further than (What's That Blue Thing Doing Here) Turn Around. Oh, it's  still a bit vague about what the narrative is trying to say, other than some interpretive dancing guy is pushed into a grave by his dancing instructor, and lands on a skull. Typical Thursday.

Dinner Bell (I Heard A Sound) mentions what happend when you turn around, and then, the dinner bell rings. Have you ever had a parent with a literal dinner bell? Before cell phones, or pagers, even, my mother used to ring this ludicrously loud bell to get me to go home. When we moved (down the street and to the left), she gave the bell to the people who moved into our old house, and the mom in that family was crackers crackers and would ring that bell and screech for so long, parents offered their children money and video games to dress up as this woman's daughter and get her to shut the shut up. This song is not nearly as annoying as that. Ding Ding Ding!!!

Romantic tropes were alread boring in the eighties. Gender norms were tired in the nineties. And tha narrator of this song doesn't want to be a traditional suitor, so he asks you (Aren't You The Guy Who Hit Me In The Eye) to  Narrow Your Eyes, and see his love from a different perspective.  Then they'll have a nice friendly breakup because their relationship is totally not working.

After some brief lyrics from the parenthetical title, (I Hear The Wind Blow) Space Suit, we get a cool, sci-fi instrumental that really does sound a bit like how early-twentieth century writers who didn't understand space might imagine wind sounded in space.

The reason I originally purchased this album was for The Guitat (I'm Having A Heart Attack / I Just Don't Understand You). I love this update of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" with its brass beat, its disaffected background vocals, and its enthusiastic lead vocalist. I epescially love its brass noise break, followed by the drums and guitar bridge. And it's lovely bass riff, of course.  It's just a super fun happy song. But then it gets thrown into the subdued statements of everything going awry.

(Everything Is Catching On Fire) Hall Of Heads is very very very Futurama. Or, rather, Futurama is very this song.  The Hall Of Heads seen through a keyhole, then heads pitched at you whle you try and leave. Try not to picture Fry and Leela at some point. It can be done, but it's difficult.

I drop the rest of the (Fingertips) songs here. There aren't that many, and they thematically link from one to the next before arriving at Mammal, which feels like a callback to the scientific research of "Why Does The Sun Shine" or "Why Does The Sun Really Shine".  I'm unclear why this didn't end up on their Here Comes Science album.

Closing out the album is more spy-themed eighties movie than sci-fi, but I really love the bouncy quality of  Happiness Doesn't Have To Have An Ending. But the album does have to come to a close. Don't worry! There are plenty left.