My Two Writing Teachers colleagues and I are hosting the 15th Annual March Slice of Life Story Challenge, in which teachers from around the world participate by posting a story per day.
When I was thirteen years old, all I cared about was music. I wanted to be a musician when I grew up. I played several instruments and spent hours and hours writing song lyrics in spiral bound notebooks. I loved the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Michael Jackson. I loved the Beastie Boys and Wilson Phillips, Aerosmith, and Guns N Roses.
Then… Pearl Jam came along. I first heard Pearl Jam at a friend’s house. Their older brother had a bootleg tape of a live concert. The sound was grainy and you really only got the gist of each song, not the full sound… but still… our little twelve and thirteen year old brains exploded. We had never heard anything like it. We all started dressing in ripped jeans and plaid flannel shirts — just like Eddie Vedder.
When the album Ten was released, my mom drove me and three of my friends to “Pure Pop,” a record store in Burlington for the midnight release. My mom stayed in the car while my friends and I waited in line with fifty other teenagers, in the dark, for the doors of the store to open.
When we got back to my house we put the CD on immediately— on the brand new CD player I had just gotten for my thirteenth birthday (the other kids had purchased tapes because CD players were a new thing). We played the album over and over and over, on repeat, even as we slept through the night. For months, I slept with Pearl Jam Ten playing. (Then, that fall when Nirvana’s Nevermind came out, I switched over to that).
The other day, I heard Eddie Vedder interviewed on the podcast Smartless and I was reminded how much I loved Pearl Jam. I’ve seen them live multiple times over the years and have always loved them, but I hadn’t really listened to them in years. After the interview I immediately put on the album Ten and have been listening to Pearl Jam for days now.
The music that I loved so much when I was thirteen brings me back to a time when I was still just a kid. I hadn’t made any huge mistakes yet, or had anybody break my heart, or felt the crushing stress of getting into and then going to college and working and being an adult. I had barely even started high school. Pearl Jam brings me back to a very specific moment in my life when I had just enough of a sense of identity to know I loved this music, but everything was still possible.