“The Fixer” – Pearl Jam
(Words: Eddie Vedder, music: Matt Cameron, Stone Gossard, and Mike McCready, available on Backspacer, Monkeywrench 2009)
I wasn’t surprised to find out that “The Fixer” started with a riff Matt Cameron wrote, as Cameron’s compositions are among the most compelling on the last few Pearl Jam albums. While Pearl Jam made their reputation with stadium sized riffs in the 1990s, their recent output tends toward more nuanced compositions. Not surprisingly, the drummer’s songs tend to play with rhythm and time signatures, stretching rhythms out and inverting figures just to see what happens. “The Fixer,” for instance, shifts between measures with five and six beats in them and again to measures with the standard four beats in the chorus.
While the guitars and drums navigate these changing meters, Vedder’s vocals play the role of his foundation. With a riff that squirms more than it settles the rest of the song, Vedder’s call and response vocals give the song a clearer sense of structure. The simplicity also makes sense not only for grounding the music but also for giving Vedder’s lyrics directness. “The Fixer” is rhythmically interesting, yet most of it is under the hood; as a whole, it’s razor sharp and focused, largely because of the way Vedder arranged the verses. Even if he’s singing about, well, fixing things, Vedder sounds resolved more than alarmed. This determination spills over into the rest of the song, making it one of the catchiest Pearl Jam singles in ages.
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