Robbed hit of the week 10/9/23 - Pearl Jam's "I Am Mine"...
"I Am Mine" - Pearl Jam
from the album Riot Act (2002)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #43
This week's "robbed hit" comes from the rock band Pearl Jam, who had surprisingly scored the biggest "pop" hit of their career in the summer of 1999 with a remake of the 1964 doom-pop hit "Last Kiss" by J. Frank Wilson & The Cavaliers, which went all the way to #2 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart. In 2000, the band returned with their next studio album Binaural. Lead single "Nothing As It Seems"
was a decent hit at rock radio, spending a week at #3 on the Mainstream
Rock chart and going to #10 on the Alternative Rock list, but missed
the Hot 100 top-40 at #49. Perhaps fans were waiting for more of a
headbanger than the pensive slowness of that song. The Binaural album spent a week at #2 on the Billboard 200, but was their first to not sell over a million copies at that time. Another cut from the album, "Grievance",
was nominated for a Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance, losing to
Rage Against The Machine for their "Guerrilla Radio". Touring behind the
album, tragedy struck in Europe where a crowd stampede caused nine
deaths. The band paid tribute to those victims on a cut from their next
album Riot Act in 2002.
The lead single from Riot Act was "I Am Mine", written by lead singer Eddie Vedder and produced by the band with Adam Kasper. The lyrics per Vedder are supposed to be a self-help mantra, with the whole life is fleeting and pain is part of life. It's all so fluid and zen and works better when you just let it wash over you. Since Pearl Jam were back with a big promoted album, fans rushed on this just as the start (as is usual these days). The music video was a live performance at a small club as opposed to the studio version, and for a rock band it gives a bit more credibility...
While "I Am Mine" reached the top ten on all the major rock radio charts - Mainstream (#7), Alternative (#6), and Triple-A (Adult Album Alternative) (#3), the song was mostly ignored by pop stations, and with a very limited single release, came in just under the top-40 on Billboard's Hot 100 in October of 2002. Internationally, the single made the top ten in Canada (#2 Sales), Portugal (#2), Italy (#4), Spain (#7), and Norway (#10), and hit the top-40 in Australia (#12), Finland (#20), the United Kingdom (#26), Sweden (#29), and Ireland (#35). The Riot Act album, released in November of that year, peaked at #5 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to sell over a half-million copies.
The follow-up single, "Save You", with a harder garage-band sound. It peaked at #23 on the Mainstream Rock chart, and #29 on the Alternative counterpart, and made it to #17 on the Canadian sales chart. Another track from the album, "Love Boat Captain", reached the top-40 in Canada (#16 sales), Italy (#23), and Australia (#29).
(6/10)
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The band performed the song on Letterman...
Lastly, here they are at the Reading Festival in concert in the UK in 2006...
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