Binaural (album) - Music and Lyrics

Music and Lyrics

Binaural found the band dabbling with experimental art rock. The album opens with three up-tempo songs before growing more diverse. Vedder explained, "We'd rather challenge our fans and make them listen to our songs than give them something that's easy to digest. There is a lot of music out there that is very easy to digest but we never wanted to be part of it." As described by critic Jon Pareles on his review for Rolling Stone, Pearl Jam distances itself from the grunge that made them famous and "delve elsewhere: jumpy post-punk and somber meditations, tightly wound folk rock and turbulent, neopsychedelic rockers that sound like they boiled out of jam sessions."

A few songs on the album show classic rock influences. The intro to the opening track "Breakerfall" uses a guitar riff similar to The Who song "I Can See for Miles" (from the 1967 album, The Who Sell Out). Additionally, "Soon Forget", which features Vedder playing a ukulele, is heavily influenced by The Who song "Blue, Red and Grey" (from the 1975 album, The Who by Numbers), with Vedder describing it as "30 seconds of plagiarising" and thanking Pete Townshend on the lyric sheet. The song "Nothing as It Seems" has been compared to the style of Pink Floyd.

Bassist Jeff Ament wrote the lyrics for two songs on the album ("Gods' Dice" and "Nothing as It Seems"), and Gossard for three ("Thin Air," "Of the Girl" and "Rival"). The album is lyrically darker than the band's previous album Yield, with Gossard describing the lyrics as "pretty somber." Vedder addressed the social criticism contained in the album's lyrics by stating, "I think what everyone's looking for, y'know, is freedom...That's part of being comfortable in your own skin. I know I had a problem with being told what to do, and had a problem with being mentally and physically constricted. All of humanity is searching for freedom and I think its important to know when you have it, too." Ament stated that "Gods' Dice" is about "judging anybody who has any sort of belief system whether they believe in God or not", and that "Nothing as It Seems" is about his childhood growing up in a rural area of Northern Montana. Vedder called "Evacuation" a "song about change", and stated in an interview that the moral of "Insignificance" is "the ineffectiveness of political struggle." Vedder took inspiration from the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle when writing "Grievance", and said the song is about the dangers of technology. Gossard has said that the song "Rival" is his reflection upon the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.