“Yellow Ledbetter” by Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam left "Yellow Ledbetter" off Ten, their 1991 debut, and the song flatly refused to stay in the vault. The band picked it for the flip side of the "Jeremy" single in 1992, and that's where the world first heard it. Eddie Vedder wrote the words, bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Mike McCready came up with the music between them, and Rick Parashar is credited as producer.

It's the anti-"Jeremy" in a way: where the A-side goes for the throat, its B-side takes the long way round, loose, unhurried and a little hazy, the kind of after-hours track that sounds better the less you try to pin it down.

Radio found it anyway, in time. It worked its way onto the airwaves and climbed to 21 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, and the band eventually gave it a permanent address, first on the 2003 rarities collection Lost Dogs and then on the 2004 greatest-hits set Rearviewmirror. Rock radio's countdowns have kept it in circulation from 1994 on, a long, lucky life for a song that started out as a leftover.

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