Pearl Jam – Just Breathe (2009)
I missed my 10-year high school reunion (for a solid, defensible reason), but I did go to the twentieth. It was a very moving, sweetly upsetting, experience.
I left my hometown just a couple of very busy years after graduating, never to return, absent purposeful family visits. I’d only been at that high school for three years. My regular feeder path was interrupted by two miserable years in a tiny private secondary school, and by the time I’d rejoined the stream I was in my mid teens and I felt like I was crashing everybody’s party. Even kids I’d known from elementary school were now morphed into people I didn’t know anymore.
They all impressed me. As a blob, they were funny, charming, talented, athletic, achieving, shit-together youths in well-formed circles and cliques. And beautiful. I don’t remember how many crushes I had, but I seem to remember that I wanted to make out with at least a third of them. In a world where – according to Jerry Seinfeld – 95% of the population is undateable, 33% is an astonishing number. I stand by it. [ed. Happily, I had the good sense to rather just enjoy the unrequited pangs than chase any partnerships; several things could have happened, none of them ideal.]
By graduation, all of my relationships there were arms-length. My closest friendships had been forged outside of that milieu, largely through other circles and school-agnostic interests. Two more years at a local college helped pave over the highschool memories.
When I showed up at the reunion two decades later, I was prepared for exactly the opposite experience from the one I got. I thought this was going to a stroll down memory lane: a pleasant, if superficial, re-visit to a generation ago, where we’d tell a few stories, tell a few lies, tip a few drinks, and fill in the blindspots that my memory left of the colour of her hair, the sound of his voice, the bellow of whatshisface’s laugh. Greg would be greg again.
Greg wasn’t greg. Nor Nancy nancy. The kids I’d not seen or heard a peep from – the artifacts of another life – for two decades, those ideal players that had fossilized in my mind as ever-seventeen-year-olds, were now spouses and parents and bosses and professionals and friends of deceased classmates and homeowners and welfare-recipients and salespeople and politicians. They had jobs and problems. They were Someones. In the blink of an eye and the crossing of a thresh, children became adults. This wasn’t a return to the past… it was a time-machine jolt twenty years into the future. I had just witnessed a couple of hundred people age twenty years in the blink of an eye, and the beauty of it – and of each and every one of these adultkids – was so overwhelming that I had to leave the room multiple times to control my emotional siege.
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They were foreshadowed, to be sure, but with the release of Ten, Pearl Jam arrived in our playlists (which didn’t actually exist then) like a rock through a stained glass window.
This outfit meant business. Though more refined than their Seattle-centric brethren, they spoke and played to an angst and fedupedness with a throat fuller than any other. Nevertheemind Jeremy, the whole album was unrelenting in its spirit, a snapped garagedoor spring to the new wave, Euro pop and even G’n’R product that preceded it. And through the tight succession that was Vitalogy, No Code, Riot Act and others, Eddie Vedder grew the innovation slowly enough to keep the same audience he started with and not so slow as to drop from radio rotation. Creativity and restlessness were in a constant balance. Theirs was unmistakably the class of the nineties, and latecomers were outside of a circle that might have inspired them and might more likely have intimidated them. Eddie Vedder was an angry artist for an angry time.
Just Breathe was unakin to any song the band had recorded before it. It certainly fit right in to 2009’s Backspacer, a lighter, more relieved collection of songs than followers were used to. They’d done mellow before, but those were more in the vein of brooding entr’actes between menacing piledrivers. Vedder attributed the new sunshine to what felt like a new political climate in the US (Barack Obama had been elected the Autumn prior to the album’s recording and release). There’s no reason to doubt that, of course, but the timing in his life is no less deniable. Eddie was 41 years old, on the eve of marrying his girlfriend with whom he’d start a family. That’s the early stages of the grown-up life.
He was the lone writer, music and lyric, of this murmur. A soft, rambling acoustic guitar re-purposed from an earlier film instrumental sets the gentle energy of the piece. It’s one of the very few true Love Songs that Eddie ever wrote and that the band ever recorded, but more meaningfully, it represents a musical ‘pause’ that stands alone in the group’s oeuvre. The title obviously speaks for itself, the very directive that would show up in 96 pt Impact Bold centered in a sunset meme on the Facebook feed of a, say, happy 41-year-old.
On 13 March 2010 musical guests Pearl Jam performed the song on Saturday Night Live. I hadn’t seen a performance of the band through any touchpoint in years. Eddie was seated with an acoustic guitar, hair shorter, eyes a bit wrinkled and deeper, voice graveled of a great many gigs, spent dollars, musical hollers and ungodly hours and travel schedules. He was grizzled now, and gentle. He sang in (for him) a whisper, never amplifying his voice as he raised the pitch of the refrain. His melody would do the talking, he had faith now.
Again I roared two decades into the future and I felt the choking lump in my throat and the saline creeping over my lower eyelid. I was suffering another twenty-year reunion.
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Time paints a lovely canvas.
