* This piece was originally written and published on December 30, 2017. I rewrote it 8,5 half years later—different circumstances, different feelings, but still it’s “the Black”.
“Some of these days you'll miss me honey…”
Do you know that song? Or perhaps a better question is, have you ever actually listened to it? Because I didn't. Not consciously, anyway. Not until I encountered it as a line repeated several times in Sartre's Nausea. I read that novel at an age when one probably shouldn't be grappling with French existentialism. Predictably, all that remains from that early encounter are hazy fragments—mostly boredom, a park bench, and an endless description of a tree. (How could anyone devote so many pages to a tree?) And those lyrics, looping quietly through the text: “Some of these days you'll miss me honey…”
Strangely—or perhaps understandably, given my adolescent impatience—I never sought the song out. Never wondered who performed it or what it sounded like. Turns out it's an old tune from around 1910, covered countless times. Nothing particularly remarkable about it, at least not at face value. But Sartre chose it deliberately. There must have been a reason.
My entirely speculative theory is mundane: maybe Sartre happened to be listening to it as he wrote, and it seeped into his prose. Or maybe it did have some deeper resonance for him, connected intimately to the time he spent writing the novel.
Some songs have significance only fleetingly. Maybe you've known them all along or encountered them by chance. But suddenly, for reasons you can’t quite articulate, they become tethered to a specific sliver of your life—a week, a few days even. Later, you avoid them, wary of memories you've painstakingly buried. Or perhaps you seek them out deliberately, holding on tightly to those brief echoes of feeling.
I'm not referring to sustained obsessions with bands or genres, but the quiet intrusion of one song, marking a fragile interval in your life.
The song marking this current interval of my life surfaced accidentally, while aimlessly drifting through YouTube. Eddie Vedder was performing acoustically in Firenze, a tribute to his friend Chris Cornell, who died the previous year. I hadn’t known about their friendship, hadn’t known Cornell was responsible for pulling Vedder from the surf of San Diego to rain-soaked Seattle, urging him to audition for a band.
Vedder recorded three songs as a demo, and threw in lyrics for one more—a melancholy ballad guitarist Stone Gossard had temporarily named "E Ballad." The resulting song, “Black”, eventually appeared on Pearl Jam’s debut album. Vedder refused to make a music video for it, fearing it would diminish the song’s raw intimacy. When asked later, he said, “The song is about letting go. It’s very rare for a relationship to withstand the Earth’s gravitational pull and where it’s going to take people and how they're going to grow. I’ve heard it said you can't really have true love unless it's love unrequited. It's harsh, because then your truest love is the one you can't have forever.”
In Firenze, amid a crowd swelling with emotion, Vedder altered the song’s final lines, calling out to Cornell: “Come back! Come back!” The third plea was barely audible, lost in the quiet break of his voice as he began to cry.
Hey, oh
Sheets of empty canvas
Untouched sheets of clay
Were laid spread out before me
As her body once did
All five horizons
Revolved around her soul
As the earth to the sun
Now the air I tasted and breathed
Has taken a turn
Oh and all I taught her was everything
Oh I know she gave me all that she wore
And now my bitter hands
Chafe beneath the clouds
Of what was everything
Oh the pictures have
All been washed in black
Tattooed everything
I take a walk outside
I'm surrounded by
Some kids at play
I can feel their laughter
So why do I sear
Oh, and twisted thoughts that spin
Round my head
I'm spinning
Oh, I'm spinning
How quick the sun can, drop away
And now my bitter hands
Cradle broken glass
Of what was everything
All the pictures had
All been washed in black
Tattooed everything
All the love gone bad
Turned my world to black
Tattooed all I see
All that I am
All I'll be
Yeah
I know someday you'll have a beautiful life
I know you'll be a star
In somebody else's sky
But why
Why
Why can't it be
Why can't it be mine