The Waiting Drove Me Mad

“The waiting drove me mad,
You’re finally here and I’m a mess.”
— Pearl Jam, “Corduroy”

I’ll get around to posting the rest of those Detroit pictures later this week…but in the meantime, there’s more pressing business to attend to. Tomorrow, Pearl Jam’s new, eponymous album drops; coincidentally, tomorrow also marks the three-year anniversary of the band’s legendary concert in Buffalo, NY, which I still consider to be the single-greatest concert I’ve ever attended. I’ve been in a new album blackout mode for a month now; all I’ve heard so far is the lead single, “World Wide Suicide”, plus a few random songs (including the masterful “Severed Hand”, which was debuted on Saturday Night Live). Thus, I can’t offer a full appraisal–but the buzz is that it’s the band’s best album in years.

I don’t believe in downloading a band’s album before it’s released. I might have at one point in my life–I’m reasonably sure I had the Our Lady Peace album Spiritual Machines at least a month before it came out–but I’ve since reevaluated my position. To me, there’s something sacred about one of your favourite artists releasing a new album; downloading it ahead of time just doesn’t feel right to me, and to be honest, it hasn’t really been that difficult for me to resist the urge of doing so. (The same cannot be said for the new Tool album, which coincidentally drops tomorrow as well; between the new Tool and Pearl Jam albums, a pile of exams to mark and the LSATs to start studying for, I’ve effectively written off the next six weeks of my life. Anyway, I’ve been dying to download the new Tool album for weeks, largely because Adam and Paul both have it, and both of them are taking turns tormenting me with hints about what it might contain. I guess I just have to console myself with the knowledge that I’m a better man than either of you are…and yet I digress.) I don’t even know the tracklisting yet; I’m vaguely familiar with most of the song titles, but I figure I’ve got plenty of time to become familiar with them. Actually, in a way I really don’t: one week from tomorrow is the first of Pearl Jam’s two Air Canada Centre shows. That gives me one week to absorb an entire Pearl Jam album–a task which, historically speaking, has taken me up to a year to achieve.

Tomorrow, we’ll see if everything has changed, or if absolutely nothing’s changed.