"Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town"

Pearl Jam
(Epic, 1993)

Around the time Bill Clinton took office, Pearl Jam were his arena-rock counterpart in feeling your pain. Eddie Vedder didn't just sing about his own haunted psyche. In this brief acoustic tune, he sings in the voice of an old woman who is stunned to run into a lover from long ago. The song whips through her gamut of emotions -- surprise, excitement, embarrassment (because, in her abbreviated phrase, "I'm not my former . . . "), regret, nostalgia (she recognizes even the scent of his breath), apprehension (could it work again?), and resignation (the refrain, "Hearts and thoughts, they fade, fade away"). It's a marvelous piece of storytelling and the decade's most extraordinary act of musical empathy.

-- Gary Susman