this remains my third favorite album of all time

Vitalogy, Automatic, Ten?

What rounds out your top 5?

i don't know that i'd have anything definitive after those 3. probably some combination of new adventures in Hi-Fi, Laid, Blood Money, and/or Bubblegum.

All fairly modern records. That's interesting. Usually you see one or two pre-90s albums sneak in there.

i don't know that i'd have anything definitive after those 3. probably some combination of new adventures in Hi-Fi, Laid, Blood Money, and/or Bubblegum.

Vitalogy, Ten and Paw's Dragline are my top 3 with a Dylan album def in the top 5. either BoB, TooM, HW61 or Desire depending on my mood. In fact there are 7 of my top 20 right there. Should we try a top 10 or 20 albums list?

High-resolution versions of the original and remixed versions of Ten are now available on HD Tracks.

I'm intrigued.

Why aren't Tens songs in SOTM?

Anyways. Found a vocal version of Release
http://youtu.be/tiF3idfHFUk

i've always meant that ("losing the pulse") in the sense that they seemed to not be going to the same dangerous places anymore. i like the music better on ten (which is probably an indicator that the band was at its best when eddie just wrote lyrics and let stone and jeff write all the music), but lyrically, i feel like what made pearl jam so compelling early on was that eddie was so willing to walk, disarmed, into the dark places - to (as you put it) ask questions, rather than give answers. not every song did this, but the great ones seemed to - alive, release, betterman, once, indifference, maybe porch. and when they didn't get there, you could tell they were trying to (daughter, wma, leash, not for you, tremor christ, state of love & trust). i've often said that i get bored by rock bands who write songs about being rock bands, but i think i understand this better now: it's not the subject matter, it's how deeply you go into it. there's nothing about eddie's biography, as relayed in alive that is particularly of interest to me in an objective sense. it's a good story, and i can see how it could be a metaphor for many things (including the failure of the parents' generation, which is one reason i always loved it), but that story could also be mishandled badly. what makes it great is how that story is told - or more specifically, how deeply into the cave eddie is willing to go, without knowing what he's going to find when he gets there. it's not good enough to just say, "it turns out my dad was really my step-dad all along, and i didn't find out until he was dead." that's just a curiosity. what's much more interesting is to sit in that space until you're a little uncomfortable, then sit a little longer - to get the info out in such a naked way (i.e. not couched in any sort of coded language - just to say it); to watch the flippance of the mother ("have i got a little story for you... sorry, but i'm glad we talked... is something wrong?..."); to admit that you're damaged by it ("i can't remember anything to this very day..."); to ask some questions (all those "do i deserve to be...? who answers...?" things); and then to admit that final existential fact is all you know for sure ("i'm still alive") over and over, once you've already declared that you don't even know if that's meaningful - but it's all you've got. that's a depth that matters. that all this happens within that musical slow-burn that builds momentum into that huge crescendo ending is all the better (and happens all too rarely, for my taste, after ten). but really, what's happening is that (a) eddie is not just pulling open his shirt to find his heart beat, he's pulling open his rip cage and pointing to the beating heart itself, and doing it on stage. it's incredibly intimate and spectacularly dangerous (in a personal way). but also (b) i think that story resonates with where our generation was in two ways. 1 - it satisfied our desire for the real (the NOT performative - the not-dave-grohl, you know?), and 2 - he's dug deeply enough that it's not just about him anymore. it's about all of us, being raised by the "me generation" with its lack of empathy or guidance, in a world without leaders or heroes, where you had to be suspicious of belief in anything, and all you could trust were the base facts you could point to yourself, like "i'm still alive." i think you don't write that song because you are trying to write that song. you write it because you're going, helpless, into the dark space and letting it take you where you need to go. robert frost has a great line that i think of a lot in these terms: "no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. no tears for the writer, no tears for the reader." that is, you don't TRY to make a poem/song/story that will epitomize something; you try to dig in so deeply that you're not sure what you'll find, and you try to stay there, uncomfortable as it is, until you know you've gotten to the marrow, to the raw nerve, to the real cause of this thing. if you do that - discover something, risk that pain of discovery, let it hurt - you'll touch people. it's a trick of luck that alive was such an apt metaphor for that moment in time, but you don't have to epitomize the era. if they'd keep breaking my heart, i wouldn't care about that. "like a rolling stone" isn't the definitive song of 1966 (in the way 'blowin in the wind' is in 1963), but it doesn't matter because it's still fucking spectacular.