![]() ![]() In 1996, Vedder would record two songs with Khan for the “Dead Man Walking” soundtrack. Khan’s music had started circulating widely in the West when Peter Gabriel signed him to a record deal in the late ‘80s and the cutting-edge electro-soul group Massive Attack remixed his track “Mustt Mustt” in 1990. That connection became increasingly pronounced when Pearl Jam would perform the song in concert in the years after its release. “Release” appears out of a guitar mist, Vedder’s voice a moan, an echo of the sacred singing of the Pakistani vocalist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The audience, as with most Pearl Jam shows, is mostly made up of diehards who see their lives in the songs, as expressed by tears or raised fists and voices. “There are two brothers in the audience and they lost their brother,” Vedder says at the Philadelphia show, citing the family members by name. What was once a one-way conversation between a son and his late father has become something bigger, more universal. In the decades since it was conceived, “Release” has widened its scope, deepened its meaning, not just for Vedder and Pearl Jam, but for their audience. ![]() If anything lifts “Ten” above the era in which it was made, it’s the compassion that busts through the Led Zeppelin-esque backdrop conjured by guitarists Mike McCready and Stone Gossard, bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Dave Krusen. ![]() ![]() It’s not gonna lessen the blow of any kind of tragedy, but at loud volumes or alone or with a lot of other people sometimes it just helps you get through…it never goes away.” “This song was about losing a pop,” he says while wiping his brow. When Pearl Jam performed the song at a 2016 Philadelphia concert to wrap a rare front-to-back performance of “Ten,” Vedder underlined why “Release” was chosen as the album’s closing statement. The final song, “Release,” amounts to a slow-burn prayer for deliverance. Pearl Jam’s 1991 debut, “Ten,” really isn’t a concept album or a rock opera in the mold of singer Eddie Vedder’s rite-of-passage record, The Who’s “Quadrophenia.” But it’s got a theme all the same in that many of the songs are about outcasts who have had decisions made for them, who have been given little or no voice in their destiny. ![]()
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