Daughter [Single] - Pearl Jam (CD 1995)

This opinion is dedicated to the nine souls who lost their lives at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark approximately 3 weeks ago while Pearl Jam was on stage. Tragically, it was during Daughter that the band had to stop it's set to plead with people to move back.

Despite it's highly overplayed status on the radio, and despite how much this song did cross over, perhaps the Daughter single is one of the best singles to own of 1990s Seattle heavyweights Pearl Jam.

Besides the studio cut of Daughter, you also get electrifying live versions of Blood and the fan favorite "rarity", Yellow Ledbetter, which in recent years has become not so rare.

Daughter is an emotionally wrenching song, especially if you come from a broken home. Lead singer Eddie Vedder creates a dark picture in your mind of a girl who has been all but abondoned by her parents. The acoustic-electric rhythm guitar by Stone Gossard is in reality the heart of the song. Mike McCready has a nice solo midway through, but the highlight is Vedder's voice over Gossard's strumming and drummer Dave Abbrusseze's steady beat. My only real problem with this song lies with the climax. Vedder spouts out the line "She will...rise above it!" right before McCready's very catchy solo. And while this gives the song most of it's anthemic flavor, it is just too much of a music "cliche" so to speak, especially for a band that has proven itself to be able to go way beyond that.

The two live songs, both taken from November 1993 concerts in Mesa (which, coincidentally, are the shows directly after the infamous "shoe show" in Indio CA that gave birth to the band's 1992 Xmas single), are just small nuggets of what it is like to experience Pearl Jam live. And actually, this whole single is a microcosm of what a Pearl Jam concert is like. You get your slower/mid tempo numbers (Daughter), your hard rockers (Blood) and to close out the show, I'd say 7 times out of ten, you get Yellow Ledbetter.

Blood here rips harder than I have ever heard it rip. And that is coming from someone who has over 150 live recordings of Pearl Jam in his collection. DaveA is absolutely thrashing away on the cymbals, and Vedder's voice is raspy, but obviously not nearly as bad off as it was during the band's 1995 tour where basically his voice was shot to hell.

Yellow Ledbetter is everything that the studio version on the Jeremy single wants to be. It's big, bold and beautiful, not to mention audibly stunning. It is here that McCready shows off his Hendrixian noodling for the first time, and it is here where McCready shows he is a very very good guitarist, probably one of the best today. And no, you still can't make out more than ten words that Eddie is singing.

For five dollars (or less), this is probably one of Pearl Jam's strongest singles. The two live tracks are specatcular, and you get one of their biggest hits besides. If you have not kept up with Pearl Jam, or find that "everything after Vs. sucked, I heartily recommend you pick up their latest single, Light Years. It is a lot like Daughter in tempo, but more mature. It also includes two live B sides from a show earlier this year.