Prompt: "A song that features the artist messing up in some way"
Selected by Gilson
***Can't find the live album version of this song on YouTube, but you can hear it HERE, at 14:09, in the middle of a full-album stream, if that's what you'd prefer.
"Thin Air"
Pearl Jam
Live at Benaroya Hall, 2004
I did not choose this to get around the live/studio version issue, because if anyone on here had picked "Thin Air" by Pearl Jam for any other prompt, I would have shit my pants. But this particular version is very, very important to me, even if I cannot find this particular version on Spotify or YouTube without listening to the entire concert.
At the end of the first verse, there is a nice little acoustic guitar part. Not beginner-level, but nothing expert, and not terribly mind-bending. The kind of little acoustic fill you've heard a million times, and that Mike McCready (or Stone Gossard) has undoubtedly performed millions of times. But here, they fuck it up. It sounds to my barely trained ears like the guitarist starts on the wrong string and never finds his spacing again.
Then they move on and play the rest of the song. Eddie Vedder makes a little joke about it at the end of the song, but that's all. Shit happens.
One time I was playing an impromptu open mic at a bar in West Chester. It was just my ex and I going out for a drink on a random evening. I got up there and played "Victoria" by Old 97s, a song which I had performed a hundred times, and if you ask me to recite the lyrics 1000 times, I get them right probably 950. But I blanked on the second verse. So I sang "I don't know the words to this song" and I kept going, because that's what Pearl Jam taught me to do on this song. After this, the guy running the open mic said "that's the mark of a professional."
It sounds small and dumb, but this is a huge deal to a performer. When I deal with the middle schoolers I teach / work with, this is something I try to hammer home to them. If they are in front of people and they mess up, just keep going. Not everything is a TikTok you can edit and shoot a hundred takes of. If you fuck up, keep going.
At the end of the first verse, there is a nice little acoustic guitar part. Not beginner-level, but nothing expert, and not terribly mind-bending. The kind of little acoustic fill you've heard a million times, and that Mike McCready (or Stone Gossard) has undoubtedly performed millions of times. But here, they fuck it up. It sounds to my barely trained ears like the guitarist starts on the wrong string and never finds his spacing again.
Then they move on and play the rest of the song. Eddie Vedder makes a little joke about it at the end of the song, but that's all. Shit happens.
One time I was playing an impromptu open mic at a bar in West Chester. It was just my ex and I going out for a drink on a random evening. I got up there and played "Victoria" by Old 97s, a song which I had performed a hundred times, and if you ask me to recite the lyrics 1000 times, I get them right probably 950. But I blanked on the second verse. So I sang "I don't know the words to this song" and I kept going, because that's what Pearl Jam taught me to do on this song. After this, the guy running the open mic said "that's the mark of a professional."
It sounds small and dumb, but this is a huge deal to a performer. When I deal with the middle schoolers I teach / work with, this is something I try to hammer home to them. If they are in front of people and they mess up, just keep going. Not everything is a TikTok you can edit and shoot a hundred takes of. If you fuck up, keep going.
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