I should have included can't keep, i am mine, and half full in there (although I don't know that the lyrics to I am mine or 1/2 full are excellent. And I say this with I am Mine being my favorite song on the record). Not all or none or help help I don't think, and I am not a fan of the Love Boat Captain image, the take the reigns mixed metaphor, and the all you need is love stuff.

I'll always play along with these

Brain of J > Life Wasted (although Life wasted has that 'see the home inside your head verse which I like more than anything in Brain of J)
Faithful = World Wide Suicide
No Way < Comatose (Comatose has some of the sharpest lyrics Eddie has yet to pen. I've used that song in classes before)
Give To Fly > Severed Hand
Wishlist > Marker In the Sand (marker is good but there are just too many memorable phrases in wishlist)
Pilate < Parachutes
Do The Evolution > Unemployable
Red dot < Big Wave
MFC > Gone
Low Light < Army Reserve (I think Army Reserve tells a fairly moving story, and Low Light is just Jeff's abstract ramblings
In Hiding = Wasted Reprise Really nice prechorus in In Hiding, but I really just don't like the verse lyrics.
Push Me, Pull Me > Come Back
All Those Yesterdays > Inside Job

Well I guess Yield takes it.

In high school it was this, In My Tree, and Nothing As It Seems that my non Pearl Jam fan friends always liked the best.

Why a good concert video taker I would never make:





sound was good though, wasn't it?

You know what's fucking baffling? Stip has a problem with the lyrics in No Way and let's it color his overall opinion of the song but has no fucking problem with The Fixer.

maybe he just really likes bubble gum

yeah yeah yeah yeah

not only that, I think the fixer lyrics are good.

I decided to listen to some pearl jam on the way home from work (first time in a few weeks) and both the fixer and no way came on. I really do love the fixer.

You're such an asshole.

"When something's (insert adjective), I wanna (insert opposite of adjective)"

yeah stip those are great

I'm gonna have to take your word for it, or take your class someday. Because this doesn't make any sense to me. I really don't like Comatose. Especially lyrically. But I really don't get the love for Force Of Nature either. A lot of people site that as an example of great lyrics on Backspacer, but I think those lyrics are just worn out and obvious. Not bad, just been-there-done-that, cliche, and fairly easy.

Team Joey.

I didn't say great. But they are good. And the fact that there is a formula doesn't mean that the lyrics are bad. Is the formula cleverly executed (I think it mostly is), are the images/phrasing that result appropriate for the mood of the song (they are) and do they help convey the message that the song wants to achieve (it does).

Comatose is awesome.

Force of Nature might be the actual worst Pearl Jam song.

Force of Nature is a terrible song, but the lyrics are pretty good.

the lyrics to the fixer remind me of punkdavid's rant about nothingman. what is the song about anyway, eddie vedder fixing other band members demos? honestly, i dont like the song musically so i probably cant get past that anyway. i think eddie vedder actually ruins it, and i dont think ive ever said that about a pearl jam song.

they should have made a separate song w/ the last 20 seconds of matt camerons demo.

more than I'm sure you wanted or may even read, but here was what I wrote about fixer in the backspacer thread

Since there’s no narrative to Backspacer it’s hard to call The Fixer is the centerpiece of the record. Each song on Backspacer explores a different aspect of the same moment in time, so it’s not like The Fixer is the end point of a particular journey. But it is probably the high point of the record in a literal sense—it’s a pure and unaffected moment of joy—if Backspacer is a triangle, this is its apex. Songs like Got Some, Unthought Known, GSMF all recall in some tangible way where the subject was coming from. But The Fixer has a perpetual immediacy to it. Even though The Fixer references its own memories, its low places, the song exists purely in the now. I can’t think of another Pearl Jam song where this is the case, and it might be what is off putting about it to some people. All of Pearl Jam’s music is burdened by their past. The force that runs through and lifts up their music is the struggle to overcome that past. It’s muted on Backspacer (the past is actually the past here, rather than the usual past as present), but nowhere more than on The Fixer, and this gives the song a strangeness that may not be for everyone. The fact that it’s such an accessible song makes this feeling even more disconcerting. This also makes The Fixer dependent on the band’s back catalog. The freedom celebrated in this song isn’t earned within the song itself, but in the 8 records and 150 songs that preceded it.

Musically The Fixer is compelling, with a deceptive level of depth (recall its origins). It starts out strong with another great ‘get up and move’ opening sequence (the first 3 songs on Backspacer are all similar in that regard). The fuzzy guitars and the bass give the song a warm, blanket like feeling; the tinkling guitar remind me of the end of Inside Job—the sound of peace and freedom; the guitar accents in the second verse have this cool wistful daydream sound to them; and the occasional sharp drum cracks (softened on occasion by the handclaps) and the main riff have enough bite to them to ensure the whole thing isn’t syrupy sweet. The bridge has this circular sense of movement to it, like it’s orbiting something really important. Hopefully someday we’ll hear what the 7 minutes sideways art piece would have sounded like, but I love what Eddie and Brendan turned this into. The Fixer sounds like mature, unaffected (or innocent, to use McP’s term), freedom.

For the most part Eddie sounds really good here. The opening yeahs and uh huhs do sound overly processed, almost insincere, and I can’t quite figure out where they’re going with it. I wonder if this is the same part of O’Brien’s brain that saturated the Jeremy remix with unnecessary ‘spokens.’ But from there forward it’s a strong performance (except for the repetition of the opening vocals coming out of the bridge). The Fixer has another winning vocal melody (overall this is probably Eddie’s finest record on that score) and Eddie manages to make the vocals sound just lived in and weathered enough to give the song a spark of triumph—like The Fixer is a reward for a hard fought struggle that, in this moment, is behind you. There’s a slight sense of wonder to it as well, not only at the gift of freedom, but the shock at finding it again after so long. The way the vocals are layered also gives the song the sensation that there’s multiple people signing along—it makes The Fixer less intimate and more inviting—it welcomes the listener in and asks them to sing along, rather than just bare witness (which most pearl jam songs do in the studio—they usually don’t live, which is why the live versions almost always turn into celebrations).

Backspacer is a political record, only insofar as the absence of any overt politics is kind of shocking given the content of the rest of Pearl Jam’s output this decade. I can easily imagine the band sitting down to write this song after hearing that Obama was elected. It reflects the sense of new beginnings and new possibilities, of a bright and clear dawn emerging suddenly after a long and dark night. The politics in The Fixer, and Backspacer in general, are found in the freedom of, after so long, not having to be political.

I always found the way The Fixer’s lyrics were structured interesting, barring one or two particular couplets I didn’t care for. I wondered if there was a name for the style they were written in (it seemed like there should be), so I asked a colleague in the English department. I sent him the lyrics and this was his response.
This is interesting -- the form, I mean, is interesting. I don't know of any term to describe what's happening, but what's happening is interesting. The second line of each stanza gives a kind of verbal antonym (opposite) to the adjective in the first line.
I am mentioning this just because I don’t think The Fixer has casual, throw away lyrics. Instead we have 10 lyrical couplets that together present, through their stylistic repetition, this overwhelming desire to repent the past, to put it behind you, to move forward. Eddie could certainly have picked some better antonyms in a few cases, but just because something is simple doesn’t mean it is unintelligent. In fact, if these lines were more involved it’s possible they would have tripped up the momentum of the song and taken the listener out of the immediate moment The Fixer explores. It also might have taken away some of the fun the song wants to have (the exciting couplet doesn’t work but he’s clearly being playful with that lyric and the ‘put a bit of fixing on it’ which I like). Regardless, it’s clear, through the resolution of these simple yet serious conflicts, that there’s a rejection of what’s come before, a desire to look ahead, and above all else an overpowering need to act and celebrate the ability to do so—all culminating with the promise and declaration that when something’s gone or lost we need to fight to get it back again. The fact that there is such a serious message in such an upbeat presentation is also striking, and after years of saying this in songs like Alive, Given To Fly, Grievance, and Present Tense (all songs that are better than The Fixer to be sure) it’s nice to see that they found another way to articulate Pearl Jam’s mission statement.

In another unusual move for the band, the song culminates in its bridge, with its ringing promise to free us from our burdens, to do whatever needs to be done, provided we find a way to make the most of what we have right now. The problem is that the song continues for another minute without giving us anything new—just asking us to live in this singular moment. That is not necessarily a problem, but the quick musical restart (and the over processed uh huhs) both undermine the moment and lead the listener to expect the song to go into a final verse. When it doesn’t we’re left wondering what happened. I’m not sure a verse NEEDS to be there, but if there isn’t one The Fixer would have been better served with a different transition out of the bridge. So interestingly enough, The Fixer’s weakest moments are its end and its beginning, two places where Pearl Jam is usually at its best. I wonder how much of this is due to the fact that The Fixer was adapted from a much longer song. Hopefully we’ll find out someday.

Other songs on Backspacer will explore the part of ourselves that looks back on where we came, or the part of ourselves that fears the future because it is afraid of losing what it has right now. Some songs will explore the promise of our newfound freedom, or celebrate being liberated from our burdens. But The Fixer inhabits a singular moment where we breathe clean air, bathe in clean water, and know that we can do anything.

Overanalysis 101 with Stip Stipson

the fixer required some heavy lifting.


I think each of these threads got more involved than the one before. It's a good thing I stopped doing them.

While I don't like The Fixer, the fact that stip can write that much about it makes me respect his opinion about it. How does stip feel about Ole?