21st Century Pearl Jam (2/7)

To sum up from last week, we need Day Thread headers, and sometimes the later catalogue of a band is really great, so I’m going through Pearl Jam’s seven 21st century albums on Wednesdays. Continuing from last week’s header on 2000’s Binaural, we arrive at the band’s seventh album, 2002’s Riot Act.

One nice thing about artists whose careers span decades is that you can pick various points in their evolution to drop in on when the mood takes you. For Pearl Jam, if I want to feel young and ready to take on the world, I can listen to Ten or Vs. If I’m, say, on the cusp of middle age and trying to figure out how to continue to exist in a cold, unfeeling universe, I can listen to Riot Act.

I was in my late teens when this album came out, and I remember listening to it a couple times and thinking I’ll probably appreciate this more when I’m older. And boy was I right! From rooting around on the internets, I’m not alone here—it seems like a lot of people who became fans of the band in their tweens/teens are hitting their forties and realizing that maybe Riot Act was the best Pearl Jam album all along?

Released in 2002 in the aftermath of both the larger PT-adjacent tragedies of the times, and the more immediate tragedy of the accidental deaths of nine fans during the band’s set at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, Riot Act is dark. I think Steven Hyden in his 2022 book on the band might have even used the word dour.

But also it’s not. Because the album is very much not about giving up. It’s about being in a dark place but choosing to recommit yourself to the project of being a compassionate human being anyway.

So here’s “Love Boat Captain,” written by Eddie Vedder and keyboardist Boom Gaspar, who joined the band as a touring member around this time. In an interview in The Chicago Tribune Vedder said of the song: “It feels a little strange talking about love that openly, but if you can’t do it now, when can you do it? Love is one resource that the corporations aren’t going to be able to monopolize. Which means there’s hope for us human beings yet.”

So that’s a nice thought.

Bonus Track: I was torn among like four songs here but because I’m a sucker for existential humanist lyrics and there is a nice concert video of it here is “I Am Mine.”

Happy Day Threading!