Pearl Jam’s Yellow Ledbetter misinterpreted
Posted on June 4th, 2008 in Funnies | No Comments »
Anyone that has ever been into rock has had to have come across Pearl Jam at some point. I had my first taste of the band in 1992 during my first year at college.
I am not sure what it was that attracted me to the band. Perhaps it was Eddie Vedder’s angry voice or Stone Gossard’s crazy rifts. Maybe it was the way that Jeff Ament made his bass tell a story with each pluck of the string. I don’t know. All I know is that I fell in love with the band and they had a lasting influence on me and my musical tastes for a long time.
One of the songs in particular that moved me (many did, mostly from the Ten and Vs. albums seeing as I stopped following the band when I got married) is Yellow Ledbetter. It has the baddest guitar and bass rifts in it. And Eddie Vedder just screams his head off at the right times and slows it down at the other right times. It is a fricking great song.
However, something always haunted me about that song… I could never parse the lyrics for the song. I started trying in 1993 and have yet to get a complete glimpse of the actual words Eddie Vedder used when singing it.
But I am please to announce that someone has indeed managed to successfully fetch the lyrics to the song Yellow Ledbetter and has put them in a video with the song playing in the background. Many thanks for your hard work in this endeavor.
Without any further ado, here are the transcribed words for the song Yellow Ledbetter, with some minor inconsistencies (as should be expected when trying to understanding Eddie Vedder as he sings):