A plea for the innocent

Fans of the blog should know about my love for Pearl Jam.  I’ve written about it before in Work hard, play hard – a blog about how the band helped me find balance between work and life when I was getting burnt out as a young lawyer.  I detailed my travels in 2024 to see 10 of the 31 shows I’ve gone to over the years.  But I feel like I did some injustice to the band in those posts for leaving out perhaps the most important part of why this band has been so meaningful to me for 35 years.

Sure, at first, it was pure grunge that hooked me.  When I started college in 1992, their iconic debut album, Ten, was on repeat in my dorm room.  It was the first of many transformative albums the band released, most of which I was in line for on the day the CD came out at the record store.  The band was young, powerful, and emotional.  They gave me everything from the reckoning of a confusing relationship with my biological father in Release to the raw energy of Jeremy which tackled the story of a school shooting at a time when those tragedies were far more unimaginable.  Ever since the beginning, there was deep meaning in the music that struck a chord of social consciousness and self-awareness.

As the band grew over the years, so did I.  And I did so often with their guidance and inspiration.  Where I did not do the band justice in prior blogs is in failing to convey perhaps the most important reason for following them for four decades – they make me want to be a better person.