Music
You Need to Hear this Song #13
Heavy Rotation — Wishlist, Pearl Jam (Yield, 1998)
Heavy Rotation was a music industry term for songs that one way or another got a lot of airplay. It referred to the large amount of rotation that a particular record got on turntables at radio stations. Since, until the 1980s, this was the only way to get new music into the ears and brains of listeners, heavy rotation meant increased sales. These were good for record companies and artists alike.
Today, some of us still put records on at home and give them a spin. Most of us don’t. However, the term still applies, though in a different way. Streaming services like Spotify sell subscriptions to listeners and then pay artists based on listens. At least, that’s the way we think it works.
For me, heavy rotation means a song that is in my head for some reason. Maybe for a moment, maybe for a day, maybe for longer. It’s a song that you come back to from time to time and still feels just as good.
This series of articles is dedicated to these songs.
Here, I aim to highlight a particular song by a particular band or singer. We should know a bit about the band, a bit about where the song fits into its history and where the song fits into what was happening in music at that time. Then there’s the song itself. Who’s playing on it, what are the lyrics getting at and why is it so good? How does it still occupy sonic space in our lives?
I’ll (try to) keep it short. It shouldn’t take you any longer to read than the song itself. To that end, I’ll put a Youtube clip of the original recording at the top of the article so you can listen as you read. Or not. And because a song is often much different live than in the recording studio, I’ll stick a live clip on at the end.
What song is in your head right now? Here’s one that won’t leave mine today:
#13 — Wishlist, Pearl Jam (Yield, 1998)
Out of all the music and bands and personalities that came out of the Seattle Grunge scene in the early 1990s, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam are, in many ways, the last man standing in 2022.
By the time we got to the end of the 90s, that genre of music was over, and Pearl Jam was already settling into a comfortable middle age. In terms of numbers, nothing they made after it would touch the sales of their debut album, Ten in 1991, but it was almost like they were happier that way. Over the course of the next four albums up to Yield in 1998, their sound would change considerably.
Many would say this change was for the better and that includes the difference in Eddie Vedder’s voice. The band had been letting its music speak for itself through Vs. (1993), Vitalogy (1994) and No Code (1996). The way Ten hurtled into the stratosphere at warp speed in a way that we hadn’t heard before, was the same way that the band came back to earth a few years in.
Not with a crash or a thud or a fizzle, like so many of their contemporaries. Rather, with a clear vision of the kind of band they wanted to be, which is to say, one with a future. They stopped making videos after “Jeremy” in 1992, they fought the good fight against the Ticketmaster cartel, they put out different live albums for each different city they played in, in 2000.
You really got the feeling that they actually believed it was about the music and their audience.
The wider set of fans had moved on by the middle of the 90s, when they didn’t continuously remake Ten. It was fine with them, since their diehard fan base only grew with the quality, depth, consideration, and feeling of their subsequent output. Pearl Jam is one of the best remaining live rock and roll shows out there today and their fans are legion.
In Wishlist, we have what was, for me, one of the standout tracks of Yield and I’d argue that it wouldn’t have fit on any of the previous albums. It’s a slowburner. Deep and eloquent lyrics with a simple list of wishes that anyone could relate to, since they’d had the same ones themselves, but perhaps didn’t know how to put them into words until Eddie did it for them.
These days, we all have a list of wishes. Looking back, things seemed a hell of a lot easier in 1998, and certainly a lot brighter. Those days aren’t coming back and although the wishes on our lists have probably changed as we got older and as the world around us changed, this song still burns brightly.
Musically, the song is straight ahead, nothing fancy, nothing over the top. The beat is laid down sparingly by Matt Cameron on drums and Jeff Ament on bass. At no point do they take over. The same could be said for the rhythm guitar of Stone Gossard and the lead guitar of Mike McCready. The guitar break at 1:57 is so sweet and even and it’s what I imagine playing on a road trip through the Rocky Mountains and coming around a curve to see Mount Robson in British Columbia for the first time. That could be because of the image on the cover of Yield, which features a stretch of highway in Montana.
Lyrically, each line could be a winner, each line could stand out by itself. It is a stream of consciousness list of things that are just out of reach to the writer. You wonder if he ever was able to grasp these things for himself.
The song begins like this:
“I wish I was a neutron bomb for once I could go off / I wish I was a sacrifice but somehow still lived on”
A life unfulfilled is not the same as a life not yet fulfilled. There is still time, there is still a reason to keep going, to keep reaching.
“I wish I was the evidence I wish I was the grounds / For fifty million hands upraised and open toward the sky”
If we want to relate that today, maybe it’s that the people of the world want to find a reason to continue to look up at the sky and find a reason to not give up hope.
“I wish I was a messenger and all the news was good / I wish I was the full moon shining off a Camaro’s hood”
To me, that’s the line of the song. What imagery. How did he come up with that? We can instantly picture that scene, which he shared with someone else. He hasn’t quite lived up to expectations — either his or someone else’s…but it’s not over yet.
The album itself has a number of rock and rollers, such as “Do the Evolution” and “Pilate” and other soaring elegies like “Given to Fly” and “In Hiding”. But Wishlist is the sound of a band playing as tightly together as they know how and a band that is just hitting their true stride, confident that there is much more to come.
And here we are 24 years later and everything has changed in our world. But this song is still great, Pearl Jam is still playing and Eddie Vedder has a new album out. It’s called “Earthling” and it it is definitely worth listening to.
Here is Pearl Jam, live in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2013
If you enjoyed this article, there are 12 previous ones in this series. Below is linked #12 and #11 is linked at the bottom of that. The first #1–10 are linked at the bottom of #11.
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