Pearl Jam

365 Day Song Challenge: Day 52 – “Lukin”

Posted on by Joe Parker

Day 52. A song that you’ve been listening to for years & you still don’t know what the heck they’re saying.

“Lukin” – Pearl Jam

As I mentioned yesterday, there are many times I don’t pay attention to lyrics. And then there are those times when you just have no clue what they’re singing no matter how hard to try to figure the words out.

Today’s song is one minute and two seconds long. There are 5.7 seconds out of the entire song where I can understand what Eddie Vedder is saying.

Yes, I timed it.

Before today I had never looked up the lyrics. After determining my lyric/vocal recognition time above, I did finally do that. And while I would never have been able to make them out without the cheat sheet, they did all make sense once I did. I could read along and say “Yep, I can see that now.” (“See” being a figurative term, of course.)


Not familiar with a song I’ve mentioned?
Click the > button above to hear samples.

Seems it’s named after Matt Lukin. His wikipedia page says this about the song:

In 1996 Pearl Jam wrote and recorded a short and fast punk song entitled “Lukin” naming it after Matt Lukin. Lukin describes the song in an interview for the book Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge: “Vedder had a stalker chick that would come by his house that was freaking him out. He would start to avoid his house after a while, so he would just come by my place. Vedder’d come over and we’d sit ‘round the kitchen and drink and stuff. He would talk about his stalker problem a little bit, but I would just blow it off. It was just drunken talk, throwing darts, having fun… The Pearl Jam song ‘Lukin’ is about how my kitchen’s a sanctuary for him. Also, I was giving him shit about all their songs being too long. That inspired him to make ‘Lukin’ a one-minute song.”

People are generally surprised that I like this song. Admittedly, it’s not usually what I go for. But I’ve liked it since I first heard the album, which was… far too many years ago now. Maybe the fact that it’s so short doesn’t give it time to get on my nerves. Whatever the reason, I’m passing it on to all you lucky readers.

That’s all I’ve got today. Short song, short post. Tomorrow will make up for it.