Oceans (Pearl Jam Song) - Origin and Recording

Origin and Recording

"Oceans" features lyrics written by vocalist Eddie Vedder and music co-written by Vedder, guitarist Stone Gossard, and bassist Jeff Ament. Vedder on the song:

I remember for "Oceans", someone asked me to put change in the parking meter for them. I went and did that and then I came back and was locked out. It was drizzling and I wasn't dressed for an outing in the rain. I had a scrap of paper and a pen in my pocket, and they were playing this song . All I could hear was the bass coming through the wall, this window that was boarded up. So I wrote the song to the bass. I wasn't even listening to hear the song at first. When I heard a break, I'd start pounding on the door...trying to get out of the rain. So as I was doing that, I thought, fuck it, I might as well write something.

Gossard on the song:

We wrote it, we played it and Ed sang it, which is another thing that he does. I'd never seen anyone engage with song writing the same way. Here's the song, let me play it for you. It goes like this. Okay, theres a change here, let's do it and he would sing it. I'd hear the melodies and I'd think, okay, he's gonna write words or whatever and then I realized later that he actually had written the words right there. I couldn't understand how somebody could do that. Since then I've met a lot of people that can do it so it was an eye opener but he does it better than anyone I've ever seen do it.

Drummer Dave Krusen on the song:

We originally tracked drum kit on that song. Then I added three tympani parts. I remember we were all in the control room listening to the tympani part with the drums muted. Someone commented how cool it sounded like that, so we kept it that way. I'm glad we did.

When the band joined the album's mixer, Tim Palmer, in June 1991 in Dorking, England for mixing, Palmer overdubbed a pepper shaker and a fire extinguisher as percussion on the track. Palmer said, "The reason I used those items was purely because we were so far from a music rental shop and necessity became the mother of invention."