Pearl Jam’s Lightning Bolt? I like it a lot, it does the job of being a new PJ album, giving em something good to tour behiond so they can pretend they’re still relevant and maybe four songs, and definitely three songs, deserve to be part of the canon. “Pendulum”, “Mind Your Manners”, “Sleeping By Myself” and “Future Days” are demonstrably first rate PJ.
But it isn’t a masterpiece. It isn’t even the greatest PJ album by a long shot. But one night it was. Maybe a week before I went to see the band at Barclay Center, I was walking home, and I began to get seriously into it. Everything I heard pleased me, I walked faster and then slower because I wanted to take my time getting home. I wanted to absorb the album through my skin.
Somewhere between the rush of traffic on the roads, and the people on the streets and the bands tight melodic skill and Vedder’s deeply felt singing, it seemed to change as I listened to it. I felt like I got what Lightning Bolt was, like I heard it clearly for the first time and its deep abiding, the swinging of the pendulum “easy come, easy go”, the movement of time came together.
It didn’t last.
The next day it was the album I’d really thought it was.
But I wondered what had happened and what it meant if the same music, which I didn’t feel profoundly about, could have such a profound effect upon. Why would that happen? Many years ago I was walking home listening to Hymns To The Silence, the Van Morrison LP, and it stopped me dead in my steps: it was as though my soul had jumped up and was soaring, and, sure, the album was spiritual any way but I sure ain’t.
Music changes on you, it fluctuates, and even the sound in your ear changes, it becomes fuller or more complete. It is like the difference between being in love and being out of love with somebody. It is the same person but they change on you, their divinity changes on you. When you love somebody you feel them differently, they inspire you elsewhere and differently. It is as if you see inside them. In music, when you feel it in a certain way, it becomes divine, the person you see is not the person they were. And then when you fall out of love, they fall to earth and become something else.
I fell in love with Lightning Bolt but the love affair didn’t last long.