Gentle Groove

Mother Love Bone was comprised of future Pearl Jam members Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, along with Bruce Fairweather, Greg Gilmore, and their frontman, Andrew Wood. The Mother Love Bone album wasn't released until 1992, two years after Wood died from a heroin overdose and the year after Pearl Jam released their debut album. A band composition with lyrics by Wood, the song finds him expressing his intractable love as he shuts out the outside world.

Stone Gossard of Mother Love Bone later formed a band called Brad with lead singer Shawn Smith, who learned a lot by watching Andrew Wood at work. In our interview with Smith, he talked about how this song came together: "I had a 4-track and a little reverb unit. Andy lived across the street from me, and sometimes he would call me over to bring over my 4-track, because he had a song or something. So I recorded him doing the first version of 'Gentle Groove.' That was cool. And then I got to see a soundcheck a little while later, the full version with the band, with Love Bone. And it was just mind blowing. To see something go from a little acoustic song on my 4-track and then transferred into a band with two Marshall stacks, it was just a huge songwriting moment, where it's like, 'Oh, that's what happens.' You can have the little, teeny thing, and then you can put it in a band and make magic just explode."