Siren Song

On grace and fear in Pearl Jam’s “Sirens”

I love Eddie Vedder. Even before I knew anything substantial about the man, I loved his voice, his presence and the raw emotion he conveys in his songs. I used to listen to Audioslave’s “Like a Stone” on repeat when I was going through a particularly dark time, not knowing it was Vedder on the vocals until years later. He came onto my radar through his work on the soundtrack for Into the Wild, and by the time I saw him perform Tom Petty’s “The Waiting” on a Youtube video I’d found by chance, I was in love. Not the kind of love that evokes stomach butterflies, obsessive ruminations and the need for that love to be returned, but the kind of love you can have for a person who gives voice and shape to the deepest parts of what you feel and lets you know you’re not alone in those spaces. He sings like no one I’ve seen sing. 

I just saw Pearl Jam with my brother - the decision to go was made less than twelve hours before they took the stage, and it was an experience. To call it life-changing might be dramatic, but it did change something in me. Eddie Vedder took us on a tour of humanity in all its raging emotion, quiet grace, devastating loss and triumphant highs. Sometimes you can’t really understand what he’s saying, but even those songs speak the unfathomable feelings we all know in their powerful, albeit unintelligible, way. I feel like Eddie Vedder reached into my soul and woke me up in a way I needed to be shaken awake. 

I’m going to write about a song they didn’t play that night; but when it came on the Spotify radio I was listening to on the way to Fenway, I put it on repeat both in my headphone (singular because I lost the left one) and in my mind. “Sirens” is everything. Maybe it was a mix of the emotional high of anticipation with whatever else has been going on in my brain, but this song had the power to summon tears of both grief and joy. That’s the thing I love about Vedder: he sings with this chord that balances in both these regions: the deep emotion of pain and the grace in gratitude and joy. And he does it the Vedder way. 

On first listen (really on the first several listens), I thought the song title alluded to the Sirens of Greek Mythology. These Sirens, monsters who appear in Homer’s Odyssey, are known for their singing; sailors who hear their song can’t resist its magnetic lure and end up meeting violent deaths upon rocks sharp as spears that surround their island. Each person who hears the Sirens hears what he most wants to hear, and that varies by person; but as they sail closer to this voice of their greatest desire, they enter the inescapable realm of nature in which the waves and tide overpower their ships and smash them to pieces on the cliffs. These Sirens occupy my thinking a bit more than the other kind: the wailing alarm sirens I hear all too often in Boston. I don’t need to explain these sirens; they’re the ones that have become like background music to city life despite their message of urgency. I think the latter were the ones Vedder refers to in his title and lyrics (based on the cover art), but both interpretations add layers of meaning to the song as a recovery translation. 

Vedder starts with the refrain Hear the sirens; it repeats in the way both kinds of sirens do. The sirens can be the persistent reminder that a threat to our current state still exists, and they can also be the cloying thoughts we entertain while in addiction and even in recovery: that returning to our substance of choice or our old ways still holds the familiar promise of relief and the illusion of joy. They’re really one and the same, the alarm and the temptation, only viewed through different perspectives. If the siren functions as the voice of addiction in this interpretation, its presence is both a false promise of happiness and a harbinger of destruction. A signal of death we can sometimes mistake for what we really want and need. 

Vedder continues, Hear the circus so profound. His circus is the noise, the chaos that seems fun and exciting from a distance, but is really just a show of illusions and temporary thrills. He calls it profound because it seems like such a big thing. A circus has that contained quality that creates an outside and an inside. The inside holds the excitement, but a circus by nature is merely a show. It sets up camp, thrives on contrived displays of varying abnormalities, and it packs up and leaves. Despite the cheap nature of the ongoings within, the outside still feels excluded from the great, round tent. That circus feeling pertains well to our relationship with addiction. We can feel left out somehow by the seeming fun of which we’re no longer a part, and we can fail to recognize the fleeting, false nature of the attractions from which we’re excluded. Like the circus, active addiction contains us to viewing delusions as the real thing and thinking that this fun was as good as it would get. But Vedder puts the circus in the same category as his sirens, placing them both apart from his current state and hearing them as reminders of something no longer contributing to his life but still present in it in an echoing, haunting way. 

As the sirens persist - I hear the sirens more and more in this here town - Vedder turns to his now to assure himself. He sings, Let me catch my breath to breathe and reach across the bed just to know we’re safe. This is how he frees himself from the gnawing sound of the sirens’ call: he breathes and reaches for what he has now. It’s a practice in mindfulness, breathing and holding onto the reality of his space. The sirens remind him of the life that could come back to claim him, and he needs the assurance of knowing he’s safe because of where he is now. Reminded of his present, he sings, I am a grateful man. I like that he has this line here; it’s a reminder of how we stay present and engaged in our recovery: the simple practice of gratitude. As if this acknowledgement of gratitude gives him perspective, he continues, The slightest bit of light and I can see you clear. This is the first mention of “you”, and with the context we’ve got so far, it’s fair to say he’s referring to someone who shares in his life, but for our interpretation, “you” could be anyone and anything good in our lives.  Not just good in the basic way that a hot shower or pancakes are good, but like Plato’s good: the ultimate form of all good whose echoes we perceive in the people and experiences in our lives. The hot shower is nice, but it doesn’t last. This good does. It’s the connection we form with others that extends from the connection we have with God. Vedder’s speaker can feel that connection even if he doesn’t yet understand the lasting nature of the love he’s found. In his need for assurance, he has to take your hand and feel your breath for fear this someday will be over. I pull you close, so much to lose, knowing that nothing lasts forever. I think this fear - so much to lose - stems from the kind of mindset we learn in addiction. Because we adopt a temporary solution to our discontent, everything worth anything becomes temporary and subject to loss. Our sense of connection that we feel when under the influence may be based in something real, but it’s only a faint echo of the real thing. Our relief from pain and anxiety has a time limit and depends on something material and exhaustible. The further we fall into the cycle, the less firm our grasp on reality becomes. Everything seems to die in time, so too does our understanding of the good. We fail to see that real good, real connections and real love are rooted in something unshakeable, and it takes time and work in recovery to trust that we don’t have to reach for love. We only have to let it in and let it stay. 

Vedder sings about a love so real that losing it is unimaginable. He’s known lesser loves before in life, but nothing so complete and life-giving as the one he has now. That’s why his fear and need for assurance is so great. When he says, I didn’t care before you were here, he’s recognizing that he’s no longer satisfied with the transient nature of the loves he knew before. Those were ones that he knew wouldn’t last even if he didn’t want them to end. When he says he didn’t care, I don’t think he means that his previous relationships and experiences meant nothing, only that he knew there was an expiration date to them. It’s not that we’re incapable of love while in an addiction mindset; we can love in the best way we can, but until we experience real connection and accept our worthiness of real love, we will always love with the fear that we don’t deserve it for more than a limited time. Because of that fear, we can live lightly, engaging in the surface level kind of connection that living under the influence allows. Vedder’s line - I danced in laughter with the ever after (great line) - reflects the kind of careless loving and living that defines our lives when we expect good things to end. We dance in laughter, making what we can of them for a time and knowing the dance has a beginning and end. A relationship born in addiction can seem like something real. The connection seems like it’s the truth, the one that will last, and the loss of it hurts, can even be devastating, but we inevitably find something or someone to numb or erase the pain and slip back into the easy, destructive cycle. This cycle is the ever after, the infinity loop our lives become when we let a substance dictate the direction it’s heading. 

In recovery, when we can begin to heal and experience real feelings, we start to see the full nature of love in a way we missed before. I’ve said the word love my whole life to my people, and I meant it, but now I feel like I was looking at love and only seeing the smallest piece of it. I was looking at a puddle and calling it love when there was a whole ocean of it to be experienced, and when I think about it today it really feels like that: an ocean of something unfathomable and alive that the four letters in the word barely convey. I almost can’t stand it, and the thought of going back to what I used to feel is honestly terrifying. That’s why Vedder’s next lines - But all things change, Let this remain - hit me right in the heart. Let this remain; I pray that too, and I know it can remain if I stay on the right path. I also know I might lose touch with it if I follow the sirens that haunt Vedder even in this moment of overwhelming love. 

They don’t leave him alone because even if he’s distanced himself from his past, the same way we do in recovery, the factors that created such chaos and ruin back then still exist. He needs to remember this to keep the gifts he has, so he continues: Hear the sirens, covering distance in the night. The sounds echoing closer. Will they come for me next time?  What he’s vocalizing here isn’t so much the fear that he’ll decide to give up this life he has, but that some echo or ripple from his past will come for him and take it away. I can relate to that feeling. I honestly haven’t considered drinking in a long time now, but I still have the fear that something will go wrong because something always did when I was drinking. I’m reminded daily of my bigger mistakes and the losses my drinking caused, and sometimes I do let those voices echo closer than I need to allow them. Sometimes I let the past weigh on me, but I like the perspective in Vedder’s next lines - For every choice mistake I’ve made it’s not my plan. He acknowledges the sirens and the fear they incite in him, but he also reminds himself that those mistakes are no longer part of the plan he lives today even if they have contributed to his path. 

The “you” in this song doesn’t really receive any development other than being part of Vedder’s current state of happiness, but he gives “you” some agency in the line - And if you choose to stay I‘ll wait I’ll understand. We can interpret “you” as someone who’s come into our life or been a central part of it in recovery; we can also view “you” as recovery itself and all the gifts that accompany it. When Vedder accepts that he doesn’t have complete control over whether this “you” stays in his life, he demonstrates something really touching. He’s not begging “you” to stay, but promising that he’ll continue to practice the patience required of waiting for something really good to come and come to stay if that goodness chooses to stay. There’s acceptance in this, and there’s also the humble recognition that he hasn’t been solely responsible for the good in his life. Finally there’s the fear that this good might not truly be his. Vedder’s speaker embodies that same weakness we all have when we question the blessings we start to see in our lives and struggle to trust that they’re real and here to stay. Since I’ve been in recovery, so many truly beautiful people have come into my life or remained in it in a new way. When I’m being truly present with them and practicing gratitude for their places in my life, I feel like my own sirens quiet down and let me be. But I’ve really struggled with the fear that there will come a point when someone learns something about my past mistakes or sees a trace of my addiction in my current behaviors and words and chooses not to stay because of it. That fear used to be a lot more vocal in my mind, and it still has a voice, but it’s lessened its grip on me. I really do believe that if I remain patient, good will stay and continue to grow in my life. I think I’m still waiting for a lot of things to change, but I also have begun to see certain promises come to fruition even in small ways, and each time I’m able to recognize those blessings, I have fortified strength to continue waiting in my own way. 

So here’s the line that made me cry on the red line: It’s a fragile thing, this life we lead. If I think too much I can get overwhelmed by the grace by which we live our lives with death over our shoulders. Listen to the way he sings that and pauses after “over” as if he really is thinking too much and just needs a second to breathe and move into the part that gets him: the grace by which we live our lives with death over our shoulders. This one line encompasses the immense miracle that each day in life, in recovery, can be. He acknowledges the necessity of grace for us to even exist. Think about the hundreds of occasions on which things could have been so much worse or on which we saw that we’d narrowly escaped harm, and consider the millions of times we didn’t even see the harm threatening us. We’re here by the grace of God, and that’s what overwhelms Vedder as he sings from this place of goodness. When we choose to look at that grace and let ourselves be present in it, the fear subsides. 

I spend so much time in fear, either reliving past experiences or imagining new ones, and I can see now that this mindset blocks me from the overwhelming experience of the grace that holds me here today, alive despite my blundering humanity. One of my biggest areas of fear involves cars. If I’m walking or running and encounter a driver who isn’t paying attention at a crosswalk or gives me reason to think a collision - either with me or someone else - was narrowly avoided, I experience all kinds of unpleasant feelings: anger, resentment, anxiety, grief, etc. I fixate on what could have happened or past wrongs, or I imagine other scenarios, and I totally miss the opportunity to recognize the grace by which I continue living. Fear can take us away from that if we let it, and it’s a learning process to choose grace over fear. 

Vedder’s lines touch on that: Want you to know that should I go, I always loved you, held you high above, true. Like Vedder, our going can be for different reasons and to different places; most of which are rooted in the fear incited by our sirens. In the worst cases, we may go back into the circus of addiction, but we can also go back into the habits and mindset that defined that addiction without even touching the substance. If we listen to the sirens and let them take us, we choose to let fear rule our lives, and in this way we go away from that place of grace. It doesn’t mean we don’t want recovery or love; we want it so badly, but we’re afraid it isn’t for us, so we choose the familiar practices we think will protect us. We isolate, we dwell on the past, we distract ourselves from the present, or we stop communicating. We do things that don’t let us cultivate the connections we’re worthy of having in our lives, but it doesn’t mean we don’t want them. We’re afraid of having them and losing them, so we go to the lonely place in our minds that still thinks we don’t deserve this no matter how much we want it

That’s the place where the sirens are loudest, and sometimes we listen to them - even if we don’t go back all the way by inviting the substance into our lives, we let the voices in - the familiar ones that we knew so well in addiction that tell us we’re not enough, we have nothing to say and are better off alone. 

Vedder gives us a reason to stay or come back from being away: I study your face, and the fear goes away. The word “study” is great here; he doesn’t say something like “I look at your face”. He studies it. Study derives from the Latin studere: to direct one’s zeal or pursue. To really study something or someone is to pursue the meaning, the true form. When we study, we invest time and attention into giving the object of our focus a place in our minds. Studying someone’s face in this way means we seek to truly know and love them. If we study our recovery, we’re pursuing the heart of it and seeking to understand it through the connections we make in people and in our experiences. We look for the grace and acknowledge the love as true and present in our lives, and in this way we ward off the sirens. 

It’s not an easy task. In Homer’s epic, Odysseus plugged his men’s ears with wax so that they wouldn’t even have the chance to choose for themselves whether to listen to the monsters’ song or continue on their way home. While they sailed his ship past the Sirens, Odysseus listened, but even this great hero wouldn’t have been able to resist the song if he hadn’t been tied to the mast to prevent such an inevitable and fatal action. He forgot every warning about the monsters and their strange song when he heard them, and his attempts to follow them were only stopped by the restraints his men had placed on him and the passing of time that placed the Sirens in his past. Like Odysseus, Vedder doesn’t have complete faith in his strength to resist the sirens, a knowledge that creates the heartbreaking beauty in the song. He has finally found the person and feeling he truly cares about keeping in his life, and he can’t be sure it will stay because of the sirens that may come for him. So he does what lies within his power in the meantime: he reaches for assurance, he is grateful for what he has, and he studies the grace in his life, all the while knowing how terribly fragile it all is. I think he, and we, can get to a point like the one Odysseus reaches when his ship has safely cleared the Sirens’ island. He recovers his senses when he can no longer hear their song, and we too can regain our sense of trust when we progress in recovery. The sirens will always be there, but there will come times and places with certain people and even on our own, when we don’t hear their call in our lives.