Nothingman

In a 1994 interview with the L.A. Times, Eddie Vedder stated, "The idea is about if you love someone and they love you, don't f--k up... 'cause you are left with less than nothing."

Pearl Jam bass player Jeff Ament wrote the music to this ballad, with Vedder handling the lyric. They collaborated in an unusual way, trading off studio sessions so they each worked alone. The idea was to go back and forth with Vedder writing lyrics to the music, then Ament tweaking the music to fit Vedder's words, but Vedder wrote the entire lyric in one session. "It took so much out of him that he was done," Ament said in the Pearl Jam book Twenty. "So I stayed in there the rest of the time and screwed around. It was the best thing I'd ever done. I came out of that with six or seven pieces of music, a couple of which I later finished on my own."

"Nothingman" appears on Pearl Jam's third album, released in 1994 near the peak of their popularity. The band could call the shots because they were making so much money for their label, so they had the album packaged to resemble an 1899 book called Vitalogy that Vedder came across at an antique shop. The album, named after the book, was released on vinyl two weeks before it was issued on CD. The vinyl version is quite elaborate, with lots of material from the book combined with photos and Vedder's handwritten lyrics.