Eddie Vedder almost prevented the world from hearing "Better Man," one of Pearl Jam's most famous songs.
Pearl Jam appeared on The Howard Stern Show earlier this week to promote their 12th studio album, Dark Matter , which was released on April 19th.
At one point during the show , host Howard Stern asked vocalist Eddie Vedder why he didn't want "Better Man" to be part of the album Vitalogy (1994).
The story that Stern knew was that when music producer Brendan O'Brien said the song would be a hit, Vedder wanted to veto its release.
While the band laughed, Eddie confirmed the story and said that at that moment Pearl Jam was focused on making music and making decisions that would protect them from the excessive spotlight that fame can bring.
“At that point, we had stopped working with MTV…We took a bit of our bright light off by stepping away from that. We were trying to get our situation under control to one that we felt was sustainable,” he says (via Loudwire ).
Around the same time, the band canceled their own tour because Ticketmaster was charging exorbitant service fees. Furthermore, as Eddie mentioned earlier, Pearl Jam had also stopped producing videos for MTV after the "Jeremy" video in 1992.
Recalling the situation, Vedder said that when O'Brien praised "Better Man," all the other band members lowered their heads because they already knew that meant he would be against it.
In the end, Brendan O'Brien was right. Even though it wasn't a commercial single, "Better Man" reached the top of the Billboard Album Rock Tracks chart and stayed at number one for eight weeks.
Listen to “Better Man”:
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