It hits you for a moment while you have Chad Harbach’s beautiful new novel, The Art of Fielding, open in your lap as your iPod scrolls through the two hundred and fifty Pearl Jam songs you’ve accumulated over the years.
Years. That’s what stands out.
You take a minute’s break from the pages and think again about what you read in Vanity Fair the other day about the creation of this book. Harbach started a literary magazine with friends in New York and otherwise worked odd editing job in the ten years it took him to complete The Art of Fielding,
At the end of ten years and thousands upon thousands of pages of rough drafts and notes, Harbach figured his work was complete enough to go find a literary agent. Not long after that, he was paid almost a million dollars by a publisher in advance money and “world rights,” and had his novel optioned to HBO for a television series. A good reward for ten years of work.
Ten years to write one book. Wow.
Good for him, you think, diving back into the irresistible story of five people at a small college on the banks of Lake Michigan, where a statue of Herman Melville stands silent witness to how an errant throw on a Division III baseball field intertwines the lives of these five people, all of whom strive to do the right things but battle their own faults and an unforgiving world.
“Garden” is playing, and you can’t help but think about the song in its historical context. It came out on the album Ten – 1991 by your best recollection. That was twenty years ago, which makes sense because you saw the book called PJ20 and heard about the Cameron Crowe documentary film honoring the band’s anniversary a few days before beginning to read The Art of Fielding.
Pearl Jam’s been together for twenty years. Wow.
You think about what you were doing in 1991 when “Garden” and “Evenflow” and “Alive” and “Release” and “Oceans” and “Porch” and all those other one-word songs came out on that purplish cassette and you listened to it over and over again while driving back to college right away and you knew that music had changed for the better.
And now the iPod has switched to “Better Man,” which you remember was from the album Vitalogy, which came out in 1994, seventeen years ago, and you look down at the iPod and see it’s a live version from a concert in 2008, which explains why Eddie Vedder turns the entire first pass-through of the chorus over to the crowd.
Sure, it’s a rock concert cliché, but you figure it probably took at least seven or eight years before Vedder felt confident enough in the lasting impact of the song to hand it to the audience at that moment. You scroll down and see if you have earlier live versions of “Better Man” to check on this but you don’t find any. You make a note to look into that later.
After Vedder resumes singing “Better Man,” he riffs off the chord progression, which is shared by many popular songs, and he chooses to segue into an impromptu version of one of them: “Save it For Later,” by the English Beat. You start thinking about that song, which probably came out in 1980 or 1981. That’s now thirty years ago.
A song that still sounds new has been around for thirty years. Wow.
You think about how a song that was thirty years old the year you graduated high school came out in 1958! How a song that was thirty years old when the Beatles broke up came out in 1941! How your favorite song, “Unthought Known,” from Pearl Jam’s latest album, Backspacer, will be thirty years old in 2039.
You go back to reading your book.
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Dream the dreams of other men, you’ll be no one’s rival.