The big break that made Kurt Cobain forever resent the neighbors riding on Nirvana’s coat tails.
Music video is here. Age restricted, so it must be viewed on YouTube.
https://youtu.be/MS91knuzoOA?si=zjNAsEJlBBkTNSKv
The most popular song by Pearl Jam in 2025 is not “Jeremy,” their big breakout that burned them out on music videos and made them refuse to return to the medium for years. You might assume their biggest song today would be “Black”—by far the fans’ most favorite track at the time—or possibly something from Vs. or Vitalogy. But no. It’s “Even Flow,” a song that seems to have found fans among younger listeners precisely because of how overwrought and dated it sounds. The band is trying so hard—bless their little hearts.
Objectively, “Jeremy” holds up. It’s got genuine hooks and imaginative eccentricities. It’s impossible not to admire how inspired the band was here. I know people who are still sick of the song from its overplayed era, back when it seemed to air on MTV every 20 minutes. But how can you really hate a song with melodic phrasing like this:
> “Clearly I remember picking on the boy
Seemed a harmless little fuck
But we unleashed a lion
Gnashed his teeth and bit the recess lady’s breast, how can I forget?
And he hit me with a surprise left
My jaw left hurin’, ooh, dropped wide open
Just like the day
Oh, like the day I heard”
This is actual poetry—but Eddie Vedder’s songs like this were never meant to be read on paper. They’re meant to be vocalized. My favorite line is the bit about being hit “with a surprise left.” He emphasizes just that line with a raspy volume boost and a melodic change that’s totally unique in the song. Why make that the line of central emphasis? Eddie didn’t actually know this boy, but inserting a moment of direct interaction was meant to really sell the idea. Singing it that way makes the listener feel like it must be utter truth.
In 1991, Eddie read an article in a newspaper about Jeremy Wade, a 15-year-old from Richardson, Texas, who died by suicide in front of his English class. Many remember the song as being about a school shooting, and I honestly wonder if the ability to be misconstrued was intentional. The music video is certainly open-ended, and Eddie includes the line:
> “And the dead lay in pools of maroon below.”
Since when can you call a single corpse “the dead”? The jump to mass violence is unavoidable. This can only really be about a school shooting—or at least, that’s how it would be read if it were written after 1999.
The song began humbly, as a demo by bassist Jeff Ament months before they had any vocalist at all. It was called “Dollar Short.” Same basic structure as “Jeremy,” but no dynamic contrast. No build.
When Eddie was being considered as lead singer, he took home several tapes to write lyrics to. One of them was “Dollar Short,” and while surfing in San Diego, he thought about how to make it a full song. He read the article about Jeremy Wade and imagined an entire scenario—complete with a fictional backstory in which he’d known Jeremy personally. He had no aversion to bullshit, and he wrote the lyrics as a confessional from someone with firsthand knowledge.
The band heard his vocal demo and were blown away. “Jeremy” became one of the main reasons they brought him in. Eddie encouraged everyone to build intensity as the track went on, and it worked.
The band later claimed they never meant for it to be a single—but it’s hard to believe Eddie bought that. He clearly thought of “Jeremy” as his “Dream On” moment, using many of the same key ingredients as Aerosmith’s embarrassingly dramatic mega-anthem. The swelling major second chord changes and Eddie’s “Ooo”s sound exactly the same to my ears.
If anything, “Jeremy” is too big. Eddie maybe goes a bit overboard with his meaningless “Aye! Aye! Aye! Aye! Aye! Aye! Aye! Aye!” line. But he tapped into something real. He thought about kids who were depressed and felt they had nowhere to turn. He empathized with the feeling of believing that anything you say will fall on deaf ears.
Jeremy Wade’s mother, Wanda Crane, has spoken candidly about the song—and her feelings are complicated. She was never contacted by the band. She only found out about the song when it started playing on the radio. She was deeply moved by the sentiment, but also saddened that her son became the centerpiece of a dramatic rock anthem rather than a nuanced portrait.
> “That day that he died did not define his life,” she said.
“He was a son, a brother, a nephew, a cousin, a grandson. He was a friend. He was talented.”
Maybe Eddie should’ve done a bit of research. Or maybe he shouldn’t have tried so hard—in both the song and the video—to make it seem like he personally knew Jeremy or was the same age. Maybe the only real mistake was naming the song after him. That feels like the kind of mistake a band like Pearl Jam would make in their early days: sincere, pretentious, self-serious, and desperate for irresistible press coverage. All the things Kurt Cobain hated them for.
But the song worked. The band never expected it to catapult them into megastardom—or to overshadow everything else they’d do for years. “Jeremy” eventually faded, and other early tracks became more listenable in hindsight: time capsules of early grunge. Most of the waning popularity of this track is from the sensitive subject matter. The band no longer promotes the song, I never hear it on alternative radio, and the video is even age-restrcites on YouTube. One day, the song will be rediscovered, used in a movie or Netflix TV show in a way that will make the song iconic once again.
Pearl Jam might have been one of the least cool bands of their era, but their weird earnestness made them fascinating. They were the ‘70s stadium rock band that insisted they hated ‘70s stadium rock bands.
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