Pearl Jam‘s “Waiting for Stevie” has been selected as Record Store Day’s Song of the Year, an achievement that will be celebrated with a 12-inch vinyl single available exclusively on Nov. 29. A live version of the tune recorded May 30 in Seattle will be found on the A-side, backed by a performance of “Wreckage” recorded May 16 in Las Vegas.
The single will be limited to 4,000 copies as part of RSD’s Black Friday extravaganza. The studio versions of both songs can be found on Pearl Jam’s latest album, Dark Matter, which was produced by Andrew Watt. The latter has performed the song on stage with Pearl Jam on several occasions, most recently over the weekend at Eddie Vedder’s Ohana festival in southern California.
Work on “Waiting for Stevie” began in 2021 while Watt and Vedder were (naturally) waiting for Stevie Wonder to arrive and record parts for a song on Vedder’s solo album, Earthling. As Watt recalled to SPIN earlier this year, “we were sitting around with guitars and waiting, and I said, I have this idea. Check it out. He says, that is so fucking weird, because I’ve had this riff for literally years — since albums and albums and albums and albums ago. He showed it to me, and it was almost exactly the same. So, they both kind of melded into each other. We presented that to everyone in the first week, and they all wrote their parts and how the sections would move. It really only became a thing because the thing I showed Ed reminded him of something he’d written that was very similar. The drums on that song are fucking biblical to me.”
Added Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard of the song in an interview with SPIN, “I think Andrew had more to do with that song than any song on the record because in a sense, it’s almost a tribute to Soundgarden. It has a riff that gives [drummer] Matt Cameron the opportunity to be as great as we know him to be. I think that drum fill coming out of the bridge is probably one of the greatest drum fills of all time. There’s just no way you can’t make the Mötley Crüe sign. I love that song. It’s the way the bass line and the guitar line play against each other melodically. To me, it feels kind of like a hit, you know what I mean? I’ll be curious where it ends up sitting in the pantheon of favorites among Pearl Jam fans.”
“The sentiment behind the music, and the fact that it’s just an overall amazing rock track that transcends when performed live, makes ‘Waiting for Stevie’ an easy pick for RSD Song of the Year,” says Record Store Day co-founder Michael Kurtz.
Pearl Jam are also making available two-CD sets of 10 shows recorded during the first leg of the Dark Matter tour in Vancouver, Portland, Ore., Sacramento, Ca., Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Napa, Ca., and Seattle. The collections are being produced exclusively for record stores and will be available at retail on Nov. 22.
Further Record Store Day Black Friday details will be announced imminently.