Pearl Jam released Vs. across the United States on October 19, 1993, following an early vinyl edition a week before. Their second album began a working relationship with producer Brendan O’Brien and captured a band whose chemistry had changed considerably since Ten. The musicians had spent months learning how to play together onstage. For the follow-up, they wanted that interaction to survive the recording process.
“Daughter” showed how much room that approach left for restraint. Its acoustic foundation gave Mike McCready a different assignment from the explosive leads elsewhere on the record. He told Guitar Player that its solo was among the few he deliberately worked out, shaping his playing around Eddie Vedder’s vocal phrasing.
The band had become tighter through extensive touring, with drummer Dave Abbruzzese adding a rhythmic dimension that McCready considered essential to its development. O’Brien encouraged the musicians to set up as they would for a concert, leaving opportunities to capture guitar solos during the initial performances. They also mixed songs during recording instead of leaving every decision until the end. “It kept us focused, kept the basic tracks more live, and kept us working,” McCready told Guitar Player. Count-ins, loose endings and spontaneous detours remained part of the finished record.
That willingness to follow an idea regardless of who supplied it shaped the opening track. Abbruzzese wrote the main parts of “Go” on an acoustic guitar, playing without a pick. As McCready and Stone Gossard explained in a Guitar World interview, the arrangement changed when the drummer returned to his kit and the others increased the volume. Gossard added the chorus’s siren-like guitar figure through a Leslie speaker. What began as an acoustic sketch became the album’s forceful introduction.
Vedder’s guitar writing was becoming more prominent, too. He supplied the riffs for “Rearviewmirror,” which the group largely followed as he had written them. Finishing its vocal, however, became part of a more difficult struggle.
Cameron Crowe visited the band for Rolling Stone’s 1993 cover story as recording at the Site in Northern California was ending. The secluded surroundings had promised privacy, but Vedder found their comfort difficult to reconcile with the music he wanted to make. After an initially productive burst, the sessions had stalled. Crowe reported that Vedder spent time away in San Francisco, sometimes sleeping in his truck, before the band regained its momentum. On the final recording day, Crowe watched him finish the vocal for “Rearviewmirror.” O’Brien then worked on the mix while the musicians headed outside to play softball.
The album’s cover gave that discomfort a face. Jeff Ament photographed the sheep near Hamilton, Montana, and later told SPIN that the image partly represented how the band felt. Its position behind the wire fence made an uneasy companion to a record being completed under intense public scrutiny.
Pulling back from the machinery around their success did little to reduce demand. Vs. sold more than 950,000 copies during its first five days in stores, exceeding the combined sales of the other nine albums in the Billboard Top 10. It remained at No. 1 for five weeks. Pearl Jam’s attempt to preserve the immediacy of playing together had produced an even bigger opening than their debut.
