Pearl Jam – Footsteps

General CommentI think the fact that the song is part of the Mamasan Trilogy and is about the killer waiting on death row has been pretty well covered. I don't buy the idea that it's also about some other girl, but I did want to add a little twist on the "footsteps in the hall" lyrics. I've always taken "footsteps in the hall" to refer to two different things, specifically two different sets of footsteps in two different halls.

First, you have the immediate footsteps, that of the jailers coming to take the man to his death.

But you also have him referring to the memory of his mother's footsteps in the hall, walking towards his room, long ago. Sometimes, if something bad happens, you don't just remember that experience; you remember the sequence of events that lead up to it, with the enormous ramifications each of those little events can end up having. And I think the sound of those footsteps might be the kind of thing, the kind of little meaningless detail, that for whatever weird reason someone in that position might remember. In fact, those footsteps, just before the terrible thing happened (in Alive), are really the last memory the guy might have of his mother, unsullied, as she was when he was young, compared to the perversion that was about to happen. Right before she entered his room was the last time things were as they should be.

So in a way, there's a commonality there, between these two sets of footsteps. Both of them are a harbinger. The jailer's footsteps, in the present, are bringing physical death. But his mother's footsteps, from the past, brought a different kind of death - a kind of mental or emotional death.

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