My Gen X Playlist: Yellow Ledbetter – Pearl Jam

I think I was about 10 years old when my parents had the bright idea that I learn another language. Classes were on Saturday mornings, which conflicted with my prime time cartoon time. What the hell was I doing in a classroom this early on the weekend?

At the end of the year, we had to memorize a speech and recite it in front of an auditorium full of people. Because I didn’t study or learn a thing in the classroom, I was in big trouble. But I had a plan.

I planned to hold up a picture that I was going to talk about. I thought I was sly to write my entire speech on the back. Technically this was cheating, so I lightly wrote it in pencil, hopefully hidden, so nobody would be the wiser. Genius, I thought.

I was 10 and never done any public speaking before. As I looked at the full room, I began to get really nervous. I could feel myself becoming anxious.

When it was my turn, I walked out on stage. As I lifted the picture in front of my face, I found my sweaty palms had smudged my entire speech. I could only make out a few words here and there. I tried to remember what I wrote, but to no avail. So I just started making shit up. I literally was randomly throwing consonants and vowels together and babbling like an idiot. Pure gibberish. Thank god there wasn’t social media back then. That would have been a nightmare perpetually watching that on a loop.

I remember as I walked off stage, my teacher had the most peculiar look on her face. They didn’t have the acronym back then, but in hindsight, it was an old school WTF expression. I’m surprised this didn’t mentally scar me for life.

Does public speaking still terrify me? No, but I still feel my nerves when I have to do it. On the bright side, living through a pretty bad experience at 10 years old meant there was only one way go from there. Up. Maybe hitting rock bottom at a young age wasn’t too bad after all.

I looked for songs with unintelligible lyrics to match my 10 year old stage performance. In an earlier post, there was the Cocteau Twins Heaven or Las Vegas. Here’s another one. Yellow Ledbetter by Pear Jam. There were many theories of the song’s lyrics. I liked this one the best.

The name “Yellow Ledbetter” derives from an old tongue twister in which you try to say “yellow better, red better” as fast as you can. Just a few times repeated, the words become jumbled and you get “yellow ledbetter.” They used it as the name of the song because the lyrics are indistinguishable, just like the tongue twister.

Songfacts

This was a fun one to read the YouTube comments. And even though we have no idea what the lyrics are, I love this song.

When Eddie said: “Onabide, onweser onaweie, Ene co manase nanaho anase nenacol auregue” I really felt that, bro.

YouTube comment by KrousiDrum

I’m drunk now and I can now understand the lyrics.

YouTube comments by tj8771

Pearl Jam, the only band that can sound both incredibly beautiful and like complete gibberish at the same time.

YouTube comment by DocProc158

I could add the actual song lyrics like I always do with each post. But somehow that doesn’t feel right. It’s better that we don’t know. Eddie Vedder proved that unintelligible mumble is OK. In fact, beautiful. I’m now reimagining my 10 year old self walking off that auditorium stage with a fist in the air and my head held up high.