Hinging on a snake-charming lead from Mike McCready, “Once” revealed grunge to have other flavors besides sludged-down slacker-punk. The opening track on Pearl Jam’s biggest and heaviest album remains one of the band’s biggest and heaviest. And sorry to the gorgeous No Code epic “Off He Goes,” a single’s still a single even if it flops. To celebrate this week’s release of Gigaton, Pearl Jam’s first studio album in seven years, here are 25 of their greatest songs that wouldn’t qualify as any kind of hit sorry “Black,” “Corduroy,” “In Hiding,” you’re just too popular. 2 on the Hot 100 and is now Pearl Jam’s biggest hit. Frank Wilson’s “Last Kiss,” which peaked at No. And finally, two B-sides ended up setting the world on fire: “Yellow Ledbetter,” a classic power ballad with no real lyrics, improvised entirely by Vedder in the studio and a fan-club single covering J. The deep cut “In Hiding” got as much airplay in some regions as anything else from Yield one-off 1995 single “I Got Shit” more than anything from 1996’s No Code.

Can you guess whether “Oceans” or “Black” was one of Ten’s singles? Because it won’t be the epic that AOR (album-oriented rock) fans have committed to memory. that was officially released, while “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town,” (which you know every word of) wasn’t. Same with 1993’s “Animal,” a standard-issue rocker from Vs. The likelihood you’ve even heard one of the official singles (“Spin the Black Circle,” “Not for You,” “Immortality”) on the radio is low. “Better Man,” the best-known hit from 1994’s Vitalogy, was not one of its singles, nor was “Corduroy,” the band’s all-time most-played live song. And because they obsessively document themselves and happen to be millionaires, you can buy any of their legitimate hundreds of live albums to hear it all, how something that seemed like a throwaway on a minor album can sneak up on you or get an extra burst of applause between “Even Flow” and “Dissident” in the set.įurthermore, there isn’t any other multi-platinum rock band with so many fluke hits that differ exponentially from the officially released singles.

They cover anything and everything: Neil Young, Public Image Ltd., Johnny Cash, Buzzcocks, Split Enz, The Who. As anyone can attest who’s attended a show by the grunge-pioneers-turned-classic-rockers, their entire catalog is fair game, and the band seems to particularly delight in pulling off songs you didn’t think were on the table Eddie Vedder’s strapped on an accordion for “Bugs,” for instance. More than almost any other non-jam band, you could argue that Pearl Jam doesn’t really have “deep cuts.” They’re all hits.

Hit songs by pearl jam