“How much difference does it make,” Eddie Vedder sang during the show-opening “Indifference,” a song usually reserved for a closing slot in a Pearl Jam set, but not tonight.
A few moments later Vedder admitted he “made a mistake in the set list” before launching into “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town.” What the mistake actually was, I don’t really know, but it was clear throughout the night that something was on the singer’s mind: transparency.
The band’s current tour is in support of their latest album, Dark Matter and over here in America, with so-called “America First” initiatives that piss on the Constitution and/or line the pockets of America’s richest, we’re clearly, unquestionably swimming in the darkness. How much longer can this go on?
“We’re not allowed to fact-check anything anymore,” Vedder quipped early in the set. I know who he was talking to. You know who he was talking to. But I will not write that felon’s name in this review.
Let’s talk mental health instead. The show’s peak was found during an incendiary “Jeremy,” complete with fans in the front rows crowding around Vedder — I mean, it was 1991 cassette-tape energy up there by stage. Sadly, the story of Jeremy hasn’t yet become a lesson to whoever makes the laws, because we’re still feeling the same pain in 2025. An effective blame put on school shootings is the mental health of our society, but not the weapons that splatter blood across walls, rip families apart, and scar communities for life. And as I write this on Mental Health Awareness Week, all I see in the news is how we’re cutting funding to, you guessed it, mental health programs across America. It is my belief that pennies matter here, the smallest of details make a huge, huge difference, especially for those who don’t have a billion dollars as a safety net. We must do better.
“Try to forget this, try to erase this,” Vedder shouted from the corner of the stage near the end of the performance. I wanted to break down in that microsecond, standing in row HH, because we’re still STILL living without answers to why children are still being murdered in this faux “Golden Age of America.” The fact remains: Jeremy is still speaking.
Humanity was also on Vedder’s mind throughout the show at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena on May 6th and I would argue that, currently, humanity is lying blindfolded somewhere in a trunk, being fed bread and water, waiting for the markets to shift. But there was once a world, as Vedder explained, where we would gather at record stores at midnight to wait in line to buy physical copies of albums instead of, you know, opening an app and streaming it via wireless headphones. Look, I love my wireless headphones, but listening to recorded music has become more and more a solitary experience — many of us use it solely as a tool to drown out the rest of the world, not to forge a community of fans who all share the same passion. We’re not all listening to the Top 40 countdown on the radio with Casey Kasem. We’re not even watching a music video on MTV. The word and idea of “community” has become a farce.
But on October 11, 1993, when Pearl Jam’s sophomore album Versus was released, a girl named Laura, who was in the audience for this show, wanted to purchase it at her local record store at midnight. Vedder told Laura’s story from the stage before performing “Daughter,” explaining that Laura’s parents wouldn’t let her go, and that she went to bed that night devastated. Little did she know the next morning, while eating breakfast, her dad would surprise her by placing a copy of Versus next to her. He had gone at midnight and waited in line. His favorite song was “Daughter,” and so, Ed sang it for Laura and her late father.
My relationship with music has changed drastically in the past five years. I still connect with certain artists and songs but hearing stories like Laura’s — it makes me want to try harder to connect. Because some kid, somewhere, still longs for that feeling of hearing their favorite band’s new album for the first time. There must always be a real place for this magic, because when artificial intelligence tries to evolve into artificial imagination, we’re screwed. We cannot, as humans, become a picture of a picture of a picture; the master copy — the original unenhanced thought — still matters.
The only song from ‘Dark Matter’ performed in the encore, “Setting Sun,” had to be stopped and restarted due to a medical emergency in the general admission pit, which turned out to be fitting for the evening’s protective sense of spirit. “You can’t talk about humanity and then let that go,” Vedder said while waiting for first responders to give him the okay to continue. For whatever reason, because of this minor detour, its lyrics hit me harder the second time around:
I dreamt to you I would belong
Held the dream you would stay with me
Til kingdom come
Turns out it was more like hit and run
Am I the only one hanging on?
The show ended with two covers, both of which were not “Rockin’ in the Free World,” but rather The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” and a scattered, raw take on Bob Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower.” As Vedder kept repeating one of the song’s final lines — “two riders were approaching….two riders were approaching….two riders were approaching…” — I had to wonder: Where and how strong will the wind howl? And how much difference will that really make?
We’re all about to find out.
