10 Fantastic Rock Albums That Never Got Made
6. Pearl Jam's Concept Album
Out of all the heavy hitting grunge bands to come out of Seattle, Pearl Jam always stood out as the most thoughtful of them all. Whereas you sometimes had to work out every nuance of what someone like Kurt Cobain was saying, Eddie Vedder's way with words painted grim pictures of internal pain as well as character portraits on songs like Daughter and Why Go. So...the fact that they never tackled a concept album almost seems like a missed opportunity.
The idea of the minds behind Jeremy making a story album should be a slam dunk, considering Vedder's admiration for the kings of the rock opera the Who. While we got the first germs of a storyline on their self-titled Avocado album, there was just none of the follow through to speak of. When talking about the record after the fact, Vedder had suggested that the original idea was to follow a man as he works his way through war and struggles to find himself in war-stricken America in the '00s.
After the hit and miss politics of Riot Act though, Pearl Jam managed to scale things back, taking out the narration they were considering and eventually giving up the concept altogether. While you can certainly make the case that this album has a concept, here's hoping that Vedder will hit upon the right idea later down the line.