Oceans

Frontman Eddie Vedder explained after a MTV Unplugged performance: "This song was a love song I wrote about my surfboard, no [laughs], actually it was about a person I'll hopefully see tomorrow, named Beth." Vedder was referring to Beth Liebling, to whom he was married from 1994-2000.

Guitarist Stone Gossard told The Line Of Best Fit that this is his favorite track on Ten. He explained: "That probably sums up why I get excited about song writing. It's like open detuning where the first chord's just straight across and it's just two fingers that come on and off to create the whole thing and then it moves down one position and it moves back up. It has a tiny little change in it but it's also got three big movements. What I love about music is aesthetic chords; the simpler the better and then another set that does something to those original chords. It's a really simple arrangement. We wrote it, we played it and Ed (Vedder) sang it, which is another thing that he does. I'd never seen anyone engage with song writing the same way. Here's the song, let me play it for you. It goes like this. Ok there's a change here, let's do it – and he would sing it. I'd hear the melodies and I'd think OK he's gonna write words or whatever and then I realized later that he actually had written the words right there. I couldn't understand how somebody could do that. Since then I've met a lot of people that can do it so it was an eye opener but he does it better than anyone I've ever seen do it."

Vedder wrote the lyric to this song when he got locked out of the studio. It was a typically rainy day in Seattle when the band was working on this track, and when Vedder went outside to feed a parking meter, he got locked out. Fortunately, he had a pen and paper in his pocket, so he could still work. "All I could hear was the bass coming through the wall, this window that was boarded up. So I wrote the song to the bass," he told Seattle Sound in 2009.