10 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries In Rock Music History
6. Who Inspired Pearl Jam’s Black?
Writing a song is never really an easy thing to do. Even when you’re saying something that’s completely from the heart, it gets a lot more complicated when you have to be that vulnerable when you’re delivering the same song to millions of people night after night. You can try to hide it however you want to, but Eddie Vedder may have hit on something a little too close to the bone on Black.
When Eddie was first coming into the fray as part of Pearl Jam, Black was one of the first songs that he insisted on being just the way he wanted it. Starting off as a basic idea by Stone Gossard, Eddie is clearly going through something on the track, as he talks about leaving behind a former flame and hoping that she will have a beautiful life even if it means without him in it. After years of being in the public eye though, no one seems to know who Eddie wrote this song for, and Vedder has never been all that interested in speaking about it all that much in interviews.
Given his behavior, Eddie may have thought that the song was a little bit too revealing, pushing the band not to make it a single and one occasion during the making of Vs. where he asked a group of fans outside the studio grounds to stop singing it. For all of the emotions that have been tied up with this song, whoever this song was written about has been weighing on the hearts of millions of grunge fans for decades now.