Mike McCready chooses Pearl Jam’s “best song of all time”
(Source: Far Out / Spotify)
Not every band wants to be as big as their fans expect. Although there are many people who enjoy their music and whose lives have been changed by hearing one of their songs, the enormous pressure of playing to huge crowds every night can become overwhelming. When Pearl Jam became widely known, Eddie Vedder gave up making commercial music. Even as they experimented, Mike McCready considered “Who You Are” to be one of the best songs they had ever made.
On the other hand, the song is the exact opposite of McCready’s strengths as a musician. The whole idea of adding him to the group was to give them another guitarist with a talent for bluesy-tinged guitar solos, but how do you manage to express yourself when most of the guitar parts in this song could be played with one finger by someone who had a month of guitar lessons?
Most people would find this kind of thing boring, but that was the point where the group got involved. No code. Vitalology was her attempt to break her streak by throwing songs like “Bugs” into the mix. But when that didn’t work and “Better Man” became a huge hit, this was her chance to go even crazier.
Now, with new addition Jack Irons in the mix behind the drums, the band had time to further flesh out the arrangements. Because “Who You Are” was such an open song concept, much of the groove was based on Irons’ odd approach to the drums, creating a groove that was much more rounded than it ultimately became.
While the song is mostly about following the groove as Eddie sings the guitar lick, it’s actually much more carefully planned than many might expect. In fact, the reason the riff is simple might be so that each beat can hit at the same time as the drum returns to the one beat.
Even before McCready heard the finished song, he already knew from the demos that it would be something special, Turn“When I first heard the song, I was totally blown away. I thought it was the best song we’d ever made.” But that doesn’t mean there weren’t some difficulties.
Vedder also said that he came to compose the song through his collaborations with international artists such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. “We realized that we had the opportunity to experiment. For example, everyone wrote that ‘Who Are You’ was obviously inspired by my collaboration with Nusrat.”
While most No code Many fans weren’t sure who Pearl Jam even was as a band, but on “Who You Are,” they focused more on writing from a personal perspective than anything else they’d ever done. After years of being in the public eye, they were enjoying music for fun again, and even if McCready couldn’t pull off a juicy guitar solo, it didn’t matter as long as his playing served the song.
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