Pearl Jam had well and truly set out their stall by the start of the 21st century. From 1994’s Vitalogy onwards, they were a band prizing career longevity and artistic gallivanting over commercial success and heavy rotation on MTV. Nowhere is that clearer in some of their choices for an album’s lead single. Given To Fly, from 1998, and 2002’s I Am Mine are two of the band’s most exhilarating anthems but they are red herrings when you look at the wider picture, songs that seemed to suggest that Ed Ved & co. wanted to become U2 with distortion pedals (Given To Fly) or a grittier R.E.M. (I Am Mine). No, they didn’t want to do that. What was really going on at the time was something a lot more experimental and wilfully provoking.
One of their strangest and most haunting single releases turns 25 next month. Nothing As It Seems, a song that heralded their sixth album Binaural, is up there with 1996’s Who You Are for sheer oddness as a comeback song. Those who were expecting Pearl Jam to keep on rockin’ in the free world were about to get a shock or three.
A dirge-y psychedelic-rock epic written by bassist Jeff Ament, a few records earlier it might have found itself as a B-side but Pearl Jam in 2000 were pushing their weirder side to the fore. Elevated by some mesmeric Mike McCready guitar parts and a restrained, contemplative vocal from Vedder, it stands as one of the most curious and out-there releases of their illustrious career.
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Recalling its creation in the band tome Pearl Jam Twenty, Ament said he wrote and demoed the track back home in Montana. “That song was kind of a little sad, minor key drone that I took to the band with full lyrics,” he said. He elaborated on its origins speaking to MTV. “It was just a little ditty on a demo that I played some hand drums on. I spent quite a bit of time with the lyrics and I think Stone heard it and said, ‘Let’s try that one’.”
Watching one of his songs get put in the hands of his bandmates was an awesome experience, he explained. “I can almost kind of stand back and just watch this great band play a song and take it to a completely different level,” he marvelled. “Mike and Ed, they have that ability where they can really raise the level and anything that they play.”
You can hear Ament’s original demo version, which featured on the soundtrack to their Cameron Crowe-directed documentary, here:
To take it from demo stage into something that could become more fully-formed and Pearl Jam compatible, Ament had a challenge for his lead guitarist. “The idea was that at the beginning it was going to have a real heavy Pink Floyd vibe,” he stated. “So I went to Mike McCready and said, ‘I need you to make this song happen. It isn’t going to be good enough unless you come up with some that’s just unreal’.”
The guitarist picked up the gauntlet and then some, using David Gilmour’s monumental licks on Floyd’s classic Comfortably Numb as a launchpad and delivering one of his most memorable, squawking guitar parts.
“Nothing As It Seems gave me a chance to really stretch out as a player,” McCready told Guitar World at the time. “I’m using this crazy, giant Fender pedal on the song, which is supplying all of the wild, swirling, distorted sounds. It sounds like a plane going down!”
That pedal used to create his part’s distinctive, sprawling sound, incidentally, ceased to work not long after recording, meaning he could never again fully replicate it onstage.
As for the song’s lyrical themes, Ament said he was affected by being back home in Montana, where the bassist was born and raised. “It’s a little bit reflecting on where I came from,” Ament told MTV. “I grew up in a really rural area in Northern Montana and Nothing As It Seems is looking back at that.”
Ament explained that he had spent some time mulling over his upbringing. “I think until two or three years ago, I looked back at my childhood as being a fairly utopian situation where I had the freedom to ride my bike around town when I was five years old,” he continued, “and my parents didn’t have to worry about anybody taking me and killing me or whatever.”
“In the last couple of years, there have been some things that have allowed some darker things to come to the surface of my childhood, seeing things that I had selectively forgotten for my own mental health.”
Released on April 25, 2000 in the US and a week later in the UK, Nothing As It Seems did not fly in high up the charts, reaching 49 on the Billboard Hot 100 and a mildly successful 22 in the UK. But as a document of a band trying to discover who they were and who they could be in the wake of a monstrously successful early period, it makes for an important entry in the Pearl Jam catalogue. Yes, better was to come. But Nothing As It Seems was vital in helping them get there.
