Musical Monday #22

Given to Fly is hands-down, without question, one of my all-time favourite songs. As my absolute all-time favourite song is by Stone Temple Pilots, it should come as no surprise to anyone, but that might be a Musical Monday post for another week.

I guess -- unlike last week -- these things are best explained with some history. I came to Pearl Jam -- I cringe as I write it -- through Silverchair. I liked Silverchair and read that they sounded -- I think the exact phrase was "like a raw Pearl Jam", of course it wasn't until later that I understood fully what this meant. At the time, I thought it just meant like Pearl Jam. Because I liked to hear bands who inspired the bands I liked, I did what I always did -- and borrow from the local library anything they had by that artist. In the case of Pearl Jam, that was their Vitalogy album.

That will have resonance for any Pearl Jam fans, but for anyone else -- it was a little strange, a little offbeat, and absolutely nothing like Silverchair. Disappointed, I gave up on Pearl Jam in disgust -- and a little confused.
It was Jon that really got me liking the band. When we became much closer friends at around 17, he lent me a whole stack of albums -- which included all of Pearl Jam's albums to that point, so up to and including No Code. I didn't have much of an opinion on them either way, not at first -- I thought No Code sounded alright, but in the end I found it was Vs that I was giving repeated listens, paying particular attention to songs like Daughter, Go, and Glorified G. From there, I appreciated Ten properly, but still didn't much care about Vitalogy or get entirely hooked by No Code. I was ready for something spectacular.
It was then that the first single from the forthcoming album, Yield, was released.

Given To Fly had all the elements that was missing from the previous albums -- a distinctive tune, some classic Vedder vocals, and more than that, a narrative I felt I could identify with.

On the surface, Given To Fly is a very basic story -- about a man discovering he can fly. It's a tired old cliche', but it;s rare that I remember my dreams -- dreams I do remember, however, are dreams of flying. Year after year, when I blew out the candles on my birthday cake, I wished to be able to fly -- before I realised that wishing it wouldn't make it so. And on that level, the story of the song resonated on a certain level with me. The narrative isn't detailed, but it seems to be about someone troubled, maybe also oppressed by some job -- there's references to a "bad time" and of being "alone in a corridor", but it's from there that it changes.
He breaks out, runs for hundreds miles and discovers...he can fly.

The song builds up like a wave to this crescendo. It's started -- with a guitar sound almost certainly borrowed from an old Led Zeppelin song -- slowly, quietly, almost like waves gently washing and breaking and washing out... It continues softly until he makes it to the ocean -- there's a lyric about how he "had a smoke in a tree", and yet you're still not sure. There's nothing yet to suggest anything extraordinary...

And it's here the song resembles larger waves starting to crash on the beach, it builds up to a stronger sound and suddenly it's not just about the troubled man, running -- the song goes "the waves came crashing like a fist to the jaw, delivered him wings 'Hey, look at me now'"
There's nothing really you can take for a chorus in the song, it builds up to a crescendo, with the waves crashing on the rocks and you're with him, flying, before it quietens down again.

Unfortunately, this is where I begin to have problems with the song. And this is entirely my own issues with religion, and my own conflicts with Eddie Vedder's apparently quite clear Christian beliefs. For me, the song stops being about a man who can fly and becomes about Jesus. The man comes back "because he wanted to share the keys to the locks on the chains he saw everywhere", but naturally of course, these things follow a certain course: "first he was stripped, then he was stabbed, by the faceless men..." -- if this isn't obvious enough imagery for you, he lays it on a little thicker "he still gives his love, he just gives it away, the love he received is the love that is saved...". It's all just so much clumsy religious allegory, and too much for me.

Luckily for me, he tones it down a tiny bit, just as the music is again waves crashing on the shore and Vedder is singing about this redeeming love, it all goes quiet again...

"And sometimes he's seen, a strange spot in the sky....a human being that was given to fly"

It inspires me. It's asking me, what would you do if you knew you could not fail -- being given to fly could be any one of us.

I love the sound of the song -- it's a short, passionate song -- it's free from elaborate guitar solos or long instrumental sessions, and it really feels like ocean waves beating against the shore. And I love the story, of a human being, given to fly.

Given To Fly -- Pearl Jam