Editor’s Note: Songs That Shape Us is a new series by Good Faith Media. If you would like to contribute, please email craig@goodfaithmedia.org for guidelines.
Music has always been more than background noise for me. It’s been therapy, comfort, and inspiration. Music is a place for my feelings and thoughts when I don’t know what to feel or think. It has shaped who I am and my faith in God.
The back of my beloved Toyota Tacoma is covered with several stickers. On the right are teams I cheer for. On the left are three bands I love: Pearl Jam, Tool, and Metallica. I haven’t done the research, but I’d guess I’m one of the few pastors in Atlanta driving around with these three bands on their truck.
I can’t name a single favorite song from any of these bands, because it depends on where I am, what I’m doing, and what mood I’m in. I can, however, name songs that have shaped how I understand God and God’s love. One of them, Pearl Jam’s “Black,” has taught me about God’s presence amid loss.
“Black”
Pearl Jam
Pearl Jam emerged from Seattle’s Grunge movement in 1990. They remain one of the decade’s most influential bands. Eddie Vedder sings and plays guitar, alongside Stone Gossard and Mike McCready on guitar and Jeff Ament on bass.
Over thirty years later, they’re still performing. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility and they’ve sold millions of albums worldwide.
Pearl Jam’s debut album, Ten, was released in 1991. Its fifth track, “Black,” written by Vedder, is a song I keep coming back to. Vedder describes “Black” as a song about letting go, about watching a relationship and a future you believed in slip away.
The record label wanted to release it as a single, and the band refused. They felt the song was too personal, too fragile, to be turned into something played between commercials.
When you listen, you understand why. “Black” isn’t an angry song. It’s a grieving one. It’s sung from the perspective of someone who hasn’t fully let go; the relationship has ended, but the feelings remain.
It’s a lament, the kind of raw honesty you might find in the Old Testament. And what strikes me most is that it isn’t bitter. There’s still love in it, an admiration for the person who has left, even as they move on without him.
Musically, “Black” begins restrained. Eddie’s voice is controlled, reflective.
But as it builds toward its end, that control gives way. He lets you into the pain. He gives the listener permission to feel as though their world has gone black.
That’s the truth about love. It can lead to both the most euphoric and the darkest feelings we will experience. To love is to risk losing. To risk grief. To risk our world turning black, as Eddie sings.
“Black” doesn’t just name that risk; it offers something like a roadmap for living inside the grief when it inevitably comes.
I often think about how much of my faith carries that same tension. To fully love something or someone means being open to loss, grief, and to things not unfolding the way I’d hoped. “Black” doesn’t resolve the tension for me. It sits with me in it. And sometimes that’s exactly what I need; not an answer, just something that says, “I understand. Me too.”
My favorite lyrics from Black come from the bridge:
I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life,
I know you’ll be a star in somebody else’s sky, but why?
Why?
Why can’t it be?
Oh, can’t it be mine?
This captures something many of us feel but rarely say out loud: wanting good things for someone, even while quietly wishing you were still part of that future. It’s less jealousy than grief wearing the mask of love.
Maybe that’s true of our faith too. We can want good things for the people and the plans that move on without us and still ache over what we lost in the process.
God doesn’t ask us to pretend that ache away. God only asks us to bring that ache to God.
When your world turns black, when something causes you grief—a relationship, a pain, a version of your life you thought you’d have—bring it to God. Not to fix it, but to name it and feel it with God.
That’s where healing begins.
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Josh Speight is the Executive Pastor at Church of Wieuca in Atlanta, Georgia