Ten

Ten is the first album ever by my all time favorite band Pearl Jam. Ten is also one of my all time favorite albums. Ten was Pearl Jam's debut album released back in the summer of 1991. Back in the 1990's the airwaves were alive with the sounds of Pearl Jam, flowing through headphones, car stereos and home stereos and I loved every minute of it.

Pearl Jam is a grunge-rock band from Seattle, that began in 1990. Currently, Eddie Vedder is Pearl Jam's vocalist, with Stone Gossard and Mike McCready on guitars and Jeff Ament playing on the bass guitar. Originally, Dave Krusen was the drummer for the album Ten, but he would later be replaced by several drummers that have since played for Pearl Jam throughout the bands existence. The band's current drummer is Matt Cameron, originally from Soundgarden and he has been with the band since 1998.

Gossard and Ament had been members of a grunge band called Green River and then later the band called Mother Love Bone. After lead singer of Mother Love Bone, Andrew Wood died, the band called Temple of the Dog was created. It had Chris Cornell, vocalist of Soundgarden, Stone Gossard on rhythm guitar, Jeff Ament on bass guitar with Mike McCready on lead guitar, with Matt Cameron on drums and Eddie Vedder as vocals.

Temple of the Dog would produce only one album that was also titled Temple of the Dog and then later Chris Cornell would move on with his career while basically the other band members would form Pearl Jam. You can check out Pearl Jam's Official Website here.

You probably have heard some of the hugely successful Pearl Jam songs from the album Ten. Even Flow, Black and Jeremy are some of my all time favorite Pearl Jam songs and were very popular songs on the radio, throughout the 1990's.

Ten has many other unbelievably successful and great tracks on it. Starting from the top are: Once, Even Flow, Alive, Why Go, Black, Jeremy, Oceans, Porch, Garden, Deep and last but technically not last* or least is:

Release


...I see the world, feel the chill, which way to go, windowsill...

If you have been following some of my other music band articles, you may have noticed that I usually don't showcase the most popular hits from a band. What I normally do is go back through these great albums from the past and find that forgotten, lost or what I would consider a highly underrated song. This is case here, when reviewing Pearl Jam and one of their greatest and most successful albums, Ten.

As opposed to some my other songs or albums revisited articles, where I chose several songs, from various albums, in this review I chose to focus entirely on one song, that I felt needed listening to, once again. Only now we have the luxury of hindsight, which I feel is important considering the song. If you are a Pearl Jam fan, I think you can hear from the song called Release, from their album Ten, what would be the beginnings of a style that would become ingrained in some of their other, later hits. Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town and Daughter from their album called Vs. comes to mind when I listen to Release. It also reminds me of another one of their great albums called Vitalogy, with Better Man and Nothingman. Tell me what you think in a comment below.


Yellow Ledbetter

The Pearl Jam song called Yellow Ledbetter was an outtake on their Ten album and wasn't included on the album's release. It was however released on the b-side of the single Jeremy. Yellow Ledbetter was included on their Lost Dogs album in 2003 and on their Rearviewmirror greatest hits album that was released in 2004. Yellow Ledbetter is another of my all time favorite songs and is famous for having unintelligible lyrics, which make it very difficult to sing along with. There is lots of speculation on what the song's lyrics actually mean. A consensus derived from live performances, where possibly real words slipped out (more than usual) and from some of the known lyrics, namely boxer or a bag, suggest that it is about war and whether a soldier would return home in a box (coffin) or a (body) bag. Although it did not appear on the Ten album, I included it because it is one of my favorite songs as I said before and has such an interesting history.

*** Master/Slave is the hidden track on or after the song Release. It's called a hidden track because it is sort of slipped into the album after a lengthy silence after the song Release is over.