Last night, rock band Pearl Jam performed spontaneously at their concert in Moline, Illinois. The show, which took place at the iWireless Center, was apparently riddled with the unexpected. The band made the interesting decision to go back in time; rather than play songs from their most recent album, Lightning Bolt, they chose to perform their album No Code in its entirety.
This album, released in 1996, successfully debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 charts that year, but dropped within the ranks quite quickly after leaving a significant chunk of their fanbase unsatisfied. No one is quite sure about the reasoning behind the band’s decision to rehash such a dated body of work, but Pearl Jam made sure to make fun of the experience. At the conclusion of the performance of a single from the album entitled “Off He Goes,” frontman Eddie Vedder joked, “Alright, end of side one.”
According to what Vedder told the crowd of fans, Pearl Jam doesn’t do shows like these often. In fact, this was only the band’s second time playing through the entirety of one of their albums in concert, the first time being at a show in Torino, Italy, where they played (out of order) every track from their self-titled 2006 album. Just when things seemed as though they couldn’t get more surprising, at the conclusion of the set, the band debuted a brand new song for the attendants of the Moline show.
“Moline, it seems, this is for me. You can call me Nancy and I live in Moline,” Vedder sang to the crowd. The song, entitled “Moline,” was supposedly made for Moline and the surrounding Quad Cities area specifically, as it was written only minutes before Pearl Jam got on stage. Vedder also revealed that the song — which tells the story of a young woman that leaves Detroit for Illinois — is related to Vitalogy’s single, “Better Man.” Later, the band tweeted, “No Code. Front to back. #PJMoline #PJFall2014,” confirming the title of the new song by sharing an image of the set list.