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Pearl Jam “I Got Id”

Eddie Vedder can’t help but sound heroic. There’s a strength and nobility in his baritone, and a courage in how he wields it. So it’s always a bit rattling to hear him sound entirely vulnerable, or for him to express insecurity and anxiety. He does that on “I Got Id,” a non-album single issued between Vitalogy and No Code in the mid ’90s. Vedder sings from the perspective of a lovelorn shut-in who feels so scarred by bad memories that he can’t bring himself to act on his love for someone. I’d say it was an unrequited love song, but this person seems entirely within his reach – he’s just too scared and self-pitying to actually go for it.

The line that always gets under my skin here is when he sings “I’ll just lie alone and wait for the dream where I’m not ugly and you’re looking at me.” I know this feeling a little too well, and that I relate to this as much now as when I was 15 is rather depressing for me. Vedder sounds so ragged and tired on this song, like he’s exhausting his last reserves of energy just to get this horrible, self-loathing feeling out of his head. He sounds so anguished when he yowls “if just once I could feel loved,” like if the sentiment of The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now” was utterly drained of all irony and cleverness and concentrated into just the most potent dose of loneliness and fear. The hero sounds totally defeated by his own worst impulses.

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