“World Wide Suicide” by Pearl Jam

"World Wide Suicide" fronted Pearl Jam's self-titled eighth album, released to digital stores on March 14, 2006 as its first single, and it comes out swinging. Eddie Vedder wrote it alone, and it has a raw sound that harks back to the band's early records, with Vedder and Stone Gossard on guitars, Jeff Ament's bass and Matt Cameron's drums charging ahead and Boom Gaspar's organ underneath. The times, Vedder said, called for some intensity.

It's an angry song about the Iraq war that jabs at the US government without shouting. Vedder said it was largely about Pat Tillman, and about the soldiers who got barely a paragraph of coverage while Tillman got pages that, as Vedder saw it, were full of lies. Adam Kasper produced it with the band, and it held number one on Billboard's Alternative Songs chart for three weeks.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.