Seattle’s music scene was abuzz today after the discovery of an ancient Temple of the Dog record with intact liner notes gave grunge scholars hope that they may now hold a Rosetta’s Stone to help them decipher over 30 years of Eddie Vedder lyrics.
“For decades, it was settled among grunge scholars that Eddie Vedder’s first line in the song Hunger Strike was ‘I stole wine, cheese and bread from the Mouse of Decatur,’ about a run-in he once had with a rodent from Georgia,” said UW music archaeologist Christina Bell. “But after carefully examining these liner notes, we discovered that all this time he was just repeating what Chris Cornell said in the previous verse! Using these notes as our Rosetta’s Stone, we’ll now be able to map out dozens of words we can use to unravel the mysteries of Vedder’s lyrics—we might even find out who ‘Jeremy in Spokane’ is, or why he can’t find the Butter Man.”
Local music scholars were thrilled with the news and were already hard at work deciphering each of Pearl Jam’s 11 studio albums.
“This is the most monumental Seattle music discovery since we found out that Nirvana’s drummer and the Foo Fighters’ lead singer were the same guy,” said grunge scholar Mark Osborne. “There are decades of misunderstood lyrics to sift through, but currently I’m working on the song Even Flow, trying to unpack what Vedder meant when he said ‘even though moths are all like butterflies, he don’t know, so he chases them away.’ I have a theory that the song is about his frustrations as a boy identifying insects in biology class, but with this new discovery I feel like I’m the closest I’ve been in years.”
Even with the momentous discovery, scholars are skeptical that they’ll ever be able to decipher what the hell is going on in Yellow Bedwetter.
