There’s a rough pairing to Pearl Jam’s singles since No Code. We get a loud, statement making moment, and a contemplative and introspective response. It’s not quite as neat as fast song/slow song, but it’s close. The order varies, but the pattern is there.
Who You Are -> Hail Hail
Given to Fly -> Wishlist
Nothing As It Seems -> Light Years (which technically breaks this pattern, but Grievance on Letterman was the real second single)
I Am Mine -> Save You
Worldwide Suicide -> Life Wasted (okay, this does break the pattern)
The Fixer –> Just Breathe
Mind Your Manners –> Sirens
Dance of the Clairvoyants –> Superblood Wolfmoon
This makes Running a slightly puzzling, pattern disrupting choice for a second single, especially as early reviews (listening parties or otherwise) have not flagged Running as an album highlight. It is also the deepest album cut (track 8) Pearl Jam has ever chosen for a first or second single. Usually, the 8-9 spot is reserved for a short, fast, tension breaking number. Your Get Rights, Big Waves, Supersonics, Let the Records Play, and Never Destinations of this world. I’m not sure Pearl Jam’s albums NEED a song like this on every record, but they do play a clear and considered function. However, these are generally not songs intended to stand alone in the way that your typical pre-release album single must. Perhaps hearing the whole album will recontextualize this decision. Who You Are and Nothing as it Seems were baffling decisions in the moment that make perfect sense now.
It's also a somewhat surprising choice as the faster, brighter, more playful punk influenced numbers often receive a more mixed welcome than the ballads, mid-tempo anthems, darker rockers, and experimental tracks. The accusation that this is an older band trying to prove that they can still rock (whatever that means) inevitably follows. There is a patina of mid-life crisis that can accompany these songs. This is amplified by a sense that they feel the most like Pearl Jam dipping into another genre, rather than playing something authentic to the band’s core DNA. I don’t think this is a particularly fair read (when you’ve got examples of a certain type of song that go as far back as Spin the Black Circle you get to claim the style as authentically your own), but it’s real.
All this is to say that Running was not a safe single choice, even though it does not appear, at least on the surface, to be a particularly challenging song. Did this quiet risk pay off?
30+ years, 12 albums and 175+ songs into Pearl Jam’s career the temptation to process a new song through prior touchstones is irresistible. Running has some of the lightness of a Superblood Wolfmoon, Supersonic, or Ole. It’s got some Mind Your Manners’ growling frustration. There is the ‘call to arms’ urgency and bite that Got Some promises and only partially delivers (as well as the return of an awesome Got Some drum fill). But there are also elements of Get Right if Get Right was played at 4x speed – the quietly seductive mixture of heaviness and playfulness that song does so well. If we were going to look outside of the catalog Good and Evil from Earthlings is maybe the closest direct 1-1 comparison, but Good and Evil lacks the emotional tension hiding below the surface of Running.
Running puts up walls even while it’s concerned about the well-being of the listener. There’s an ethic of care running through it that is hard to describe or pinpoint, but feels real, nevertheless. This is present in almost all Pearl Jam songs - manifesting in expressions of solidarity, heart on sleeve sentimentality, lack of irony – but it is more difficult to process when delivered in a musical format that feels fast, breezy, and doesn’t leave space for reflection (the bridge seems out of place in part because it unexpectedly introduces that space, just for a moment). Running wants the listener to do a little bit of work (as most Pearl Jam songs do), without signaling there are depths (as Dark Matter does from jump). Exploring the inherent tension between alienation and solidarity, frustration and optimism, reality and possibility, is what Pearl Jam does as well as anyone, but even after thirty years it can be easy to miss in songs that lack obvious cues to look.
Enough preamble - what about the song itself? Matt and Jeff give Running a propulsive, infectious bounce before the guitars show up to join the fun. The familiar punk chord progressions are present, but interspersed with a dentist’s drill guitar interplay that persists throughout the song (sadly a bit buried in the mix). There is a ‘deck chairs on the Titanic’ party vibe to the whole composition, to the point that Matt’s playing almost sounds like handclaps.
Eddie’s vocal melody is great – a real ear worm cadence that refuses to leave my head. This is especially true of the chorus. It’s catchy as hell, and lyrics like:
“Lost in the tunnel and the tunnel's getting funneled
Like the sewage in the plumbing
'Cause we left the fucking water running”
Should not be nearly as sticky as they are. The whole thing is delivered with a ‘burn it down’ shrug that never devolves into nihilism. It’s an incredibly winning performance, and one of the better choruses in recent memory.
Eddie wisely makes the choice to sing in a lower register, resisting the higher, sharper vocals that he often brings to songs like this. Thus far the Dark Matter performances we’ve heard feel like a combination of Riot Act’s range (the space he should be inhabiting) melded with the spitfire energy of the S/T record, and they sit within the music rather than lying on top of it. It sounds like Eddie is working in service of the song rather than the song existing as a vehicle for Eddie. When your band is as talented as Pearl Jam, it’s what you want to see.
The lyrics have a ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’ energy (endless running, diving into bottomless depths), but while this is undoubtedly a frustrated song, it’s offset by a stubborn refusal to stop. Running is tired, but it’s not exhausted. Movement has always been one of Eddie’s primary metaphors for change and possibility. If we stop, nothing changes, and they win.
The bridge is the highlight (as is often the case), although it brings enough stakes raising drama to almost feel like it belongs in a different song. The lyrics are resigned, almost defeatist - false starts, movement denied, the inevitability of death. The thing we are running out of is time. But it successfully transitions into a propulsive solo and outro tantrum that doubles down on the desire, the NEED for emancipation at the heart of their music. And Running doesn’t end as much as it smashes to a halt.
A superficial read of Running is that this is an older band trying to recapture their youth. And while your mileage of the song as a song may vary, this interpretation strikes me as overly cynical, and probably wrong. The critique, the tension, the defiance, the commitment, and the grasping need for the world to be better than it is- this is who Pearl Jam are, and what their music has always been. The context changes, but the core remains the same. You can’t recapture something you’ve never let go.
