Ten (Pearl Jam Album) - Music and Lyrics

Music and Lyrics

Several of the songs on Ten started as instrumental compositions that Vedder added lyrics to after he joined the band. Regarding the lyrics, Vedder said, "All I really believe in is this fucking moment, like right now. And that, actually, is what the whole album talks about." Vedder's lyrics for Ten deal with subjects like depression, suicide, loneliness, and murder. The album also tackles social concerns such as homelessness ("Even Flow") and the use of psychiatric hospitals ("Why Go"). The song "Jeremy" and its accompanying video were inspired by a true story in which a high school student shot himself in front of his classmates.

Many listeners interpreted "Alive" as an inspirational anthem due to its decidedly uplifting instrumentals and chorus. Vedder has since revealed that the song tells the semi-autobiographical tale of a son discovering that his father is actually his stepfather (his real father having died long ago), while his mother's grief turns her to sexually embrace her son, who strongly resembles the biological father. "Alive" and "Once" formed part of a song cycle in what Vedder later described as a "mini-opera" entitled Momma-Son (the third song, "Footsteps", appeared as a B-side on the "Jeremy" single). Vedder explained that the lyrics told the story of a young man whose father dies ("Alive"), causing him to go on a killing spree ("Once") which leads to his capture and execution ("Footsteps"). It was later revealed that Vedder's lyrics were inspired by his long-held hurt in discovering at age 17 that the man he thought was his father was not, and that his real father had already died.

While Ten deals with dark subject matter, it has almost been universally considered to be a high water-mark of the early 1990s alternative rock sound, with Vedder's unusually deep and strong (and later much imitated) voice alternating between solidity and vibrato against the unrestrained, guitar-heavy, hard rock sound that drew influence from Led Zeppelin and other rock bands of the 1970s. Ten's musical style, influenced by classic rock, combined an "expansive harmonic vocabulary" with an anthemic sound. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic stated that the songs on the album fused "the riff-heavy stadium rock of the '70s with the grit and anger of '80s post-punk, without ever neglecting hooks and choruses."

Ten features a two-part track entitled "Master/Slave" that both opens and closes the album. The first part begins the album, before "Once" starts, and the second part closes the album, after "Release". It begins about ten seconds after the album's closer "Release" as a hidden track, but both count as one track on the CD. The song is entirely instrumental (except for random unintelligible words Vedder utters throughout) with a dominant fretless bass line makes up the core of the song (which Ament referred to in a 1994 Bass Player magazine interview as "my tribute to (fretless bass instrumentalist) Mick Karn"), along with some guitar and sounds that seem to come from the drums. Producer Rick Parashar stated in 2002, "As I recall, I think Jeff had, like, a bass line...I heard the bass line and then we kind of were collaborating on that in the control room, and then I just started programming on the keyboard all this stuff; he was jamming with it and it just kind of came about like that."