Scared of Fear
Summary
Scared of Fear opens Dark Matter, Pearl Jam’s twelfth album and their first with producer Andrew Watt. It was one of the very first things the band wrote for the record — captured, along with its companion “React, Respond,” on the first day the five members jammed together in Watt’s home studio in 2021 MOJO . Watt has called it plainly “the first song we made” with the band Rolling Stone (feature) . The album famously begins not with a guitar but with the crack of a billiard ball, a sound Eddie Vedder recorded on his phone while shooting pool with his friend Sean Penn pearljamonline.it . Never released as a single, the track still became a fixture of the 2024–25 tour and a critical favorite — Rolling Stone called it “the rocking opener” of “one of their best and most personal records ever” Rolling Stone .
The song sets the emotional and sonic keynote for the whole record. It is a driving, guitar-forward rocker about fear, loss, and reconnection, and it announces Dark Matter’s two governing impulses at once: a deliberate return to the crunch and immediacy of the band’s early-’90s sound, and a distinctly late-career reckoning with what has been lost along the way. Louder heard the entire album’s DNA in its first seconds, calling the opener “the essence of Pearl Jam bottled, shook up and uncorked” Louder . Dark Matter went on to debut at number five on the Billboard 200 and to earn broadly enthusiastic reviews — an 81 on Metacritic, denoting “universal acclaim” — making “Scared of Fear” the front door to one of the most warmly received records of the band’s later career Wikipedia .
Key Details
| Attribute | Details |
|---|---|
| Album | Dark Matter (2024), track 1 |
| Written | First day of the band’s 2021 sessions with Andrew Watt, at Watt’s home studio in Beverly Hills MOJO |
| Recorded | Initial sessions February 2021 at Watt’s home studio; bulk of the album over three weeks in 2023 at Shangri-La, Malibu Wikipedia |
| Writers | Music by Pearl Jam and Andrew Watt; lyrics by Eddie Vedder MOJO |
| Producer | Andrew Watt |
| Engineering | Paul LaMalfa and Marco Sonzini Wikipedia |
| Mixing / Mastering | Serban Ghenea Wikipedia / Matt Colton Wikipedia |
| Single? | No — the album’s singles were “Dark Matter,” “Running,” “Wreckage,” and “Waiting for Stevie” Wikipedia |
| Album chart | Debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 Wikipedia |
| Live debut | April 22, 2024, filmed at the band’s Seattle warehouse; 31 Pearl Jam performances logged as of mid-2026 setlist.fm |
Background & Inspiration
“Scared of Fear” is the sound of a band starting fresh. After the long, demo-driven, largely remote assembly of 2020’s Gigaton — a record pieced together over years and finished under the shadow of the pandemic — Pearl Jam wanted the opposite: everyone in one room, writing on the spot, chasing the spark of a live take. That impulse led them to Andrew Watt, a young, hit-making producer and lifelong Pearl Jam obsessive who had recently produced Eddie Vedder’s 2022 solo album Earthling and who approached the band’s catalog with the reverence of a fan and the instincts of a rock lifer.
The first day. The band convened at Watt’s home studio — a basement room in Beverly Hills — and the song that would become “Scared of Fear” arrived almost immediately. On the first day, guitarist Stone Gossard offered a riff, and the arrangement fell into place in real time. Bassist Jeff Ament described the speed of it to MOJO:
“Stone had a great riff. It was just getting in a circle and throwing things out: ‘Let’s do this.’ Within five minutes of having the bones of the arrangement, Ed came up with the crux of the lyrics.”
— Jeff Ament MOJO
Gossard corroborated the timeline in his own interview, noting that “‘Scared of Fear’ and ‘React, Respond’ were done on the first day” and describing the origin as “a Stone two-parter” that “evolved,” with Vedder shaping how the sections repeated SPIN (via Yahoo) . MOJO characterized the recorded result as “a maelstrom caught on Pearl Jam’s first day with Watt” MOJO . For a band that had spent decades laboring over arrangements, the immediacy was the point — proof that the five of them could still catch lightning by simply plugging in and playing at each other.
Watt in the room, not above it. Watt was never a hands-off presence at the console. Gossard notes that he played guitar throughout the sessions: “Andrew had a guitar on the whole time. We would all play together, and some of his playing is on the album” SPIN (via Yahoo) . That approach — the producer as a sixth player rather than a technician behind glass — is central to how “Scared of Fear” was made. Watt described the song as the very beginning of the relationship, the moment the band first sat down face-to-face with him and simply made something: “That’s the first song we made. It was the first time that Pearl Jam sat down face to face in front of each other with me” Rolling Stone (feature) . Watt’s stated ambition for the whole album — and the opener is its first evidence — was to wed the grit and power of Pearl Jam’s classic early albums to a sleeker, more modern sound, and “Scared of Fear” is where that thesis was first tested.
Two eras of the record. It is worth noting how much of Dark Matter’s timeline this one song spans. The initial recording sessions took place in February 2021 at Watt’s home studio, yielding the first two tracks — “Scared of Fear” and “React, Respond” — before the band reconvened to cut the bulk of the album over roughly three weeks in 2023 at Shangri-La in Malibu Wikipedia . That means the album’s opener is, in effect, its oldest recorded material: the seed from which the whole project grew, and the take that convinced everyone the Watt collaboration would work. Gossard has described the early sessions as a compressed burst of productivity — the band was at Watt’s studio “for probably 10 days,” knocking out the first two songs and starting the basics of “Waiting for Stevie” within the first couple of days SPIN (via Yahoo) . For a band that had labored for years over Gigaton, the speed was revelatory, and “Scared of Fear” is the first fruit of it.
Why the immediacy mattered. The larger significance of the song’s origin is what it proved about the band’s chemistry with a new producer. Pearl Jam had worked with Brendan O’Brien for most of their catalog and with Josh Evans on Gigaton; taking on a younger, pop-adjacent hitmaker was a gamble. That the first thing they made together was a keeper — a “maelstrom” captured live in a room and strong enough to open the album — settled the question of whether the collaboration would produce genuine Pearl Jam music rather than a producer’s idea of it. In that sense the song functions as both the album’s opening statement and the project’s proof of concept: the moment the band learned they could change their working method without losing themselves.
The billiard-ball intro
Rather than drop straight into Gossard’s riff, the band built a short ambient prelude — a decision Gossard framed as a staging problem:
“We wanted to open the album with ‘Scared of Fear,’ but that would have been a dead start to set the table. So, we built this little intro, and I’m sure Andrew was excited about having something that harkened back to Ten a little bit.”
— Stone Gossard Songfacts
That prelude is broken by the recorded clack of a pool ball, which functions as a cue for the full band to drop in. Gossard credits the intro itself to “Jeff and Andrew” SPIN (via Yahoo) , while the billiard sample came from Vedder’s phone, caught mid-game with Sean Penn — who is credited on the album with playing “pool cue” on the track Wikipedia . The choice is more than a novelty. By opening the album with a field recording of two friends at a pool table, the band foregrounds intimacy and human presence before a single note of music — a small, private moment blown up to album-opening scale, which quietly primes the record’s larger themes of friendship, memory, and the passage of time.
The gesture also carries a self-conscious sense of lineage. Ten, the band’s 1991 debut, famously eased in with atmosphere rather than an immediate hook, and Gossard’s admission that the intro was meant to “harken back to Ten a little bit” makes the callback explicit Songfacts . For a comeback record built on recapturing the fire of the band’s youth, beginning with a nod to their first album is a fitting act of framing.
Lyrics & Interpretation
Vedder’s lyric is a reckoning with loss, distance, and the fear of ending up alone. It is written less as a narrative than as a mood — a series of anxious questions and elegiac refrains that circle the same wound. The verses tremble with self-doubt: the narrator wonders whether he has said the wrong thing, whether he still belongs, whether he has to be afraid at all. The title itself is the thesis. This is being scared of fear — the paralysis rather than any single threat — which makes the song less about a specific danger than about the corrosive dread that keeps a person from acting, connecting, or moving forward.
The “used to” chorus. The most quoted passage is the chorus’s litany of things now gone, each preceded by “we used to”:
“We used to laugh / We used to sing / We used to dance / We used to believe” Rolling Stone
Read on the page, the lines are almost unbearably simple — four verbs of joy and communion, all in the past tense. The escalation from laugh to sing to dance to believe moves from the physical and social to the spiritual, so that the final loss is not an activity but a faith. Rolling Stone heard the whole album’s emotional register in these four lines, calling them the record’s “big emotional bang” Rolling Stone , and Ultimate Classic Rock noted that Vedder sings “We used to laugh, we used to sing” “with chest-pounding reflection” Ultimate Classic Rock .
The shifting refrain. Vedder varies the refrain as the song moves — the “we had our own scene / theme” line mutates from possession into identity, turning a private world into past tense Loudwire . That small mutation is the lyric’s engine: each pass through the chorus subtly reframes what has been lost, so the song feels like a mind worrying at a memory, unable to leave it alone.
A song about a scene. Multiple readers have heard the “used to” litany as an elegy for something bigger than one relationship. MOJO read the lyric as “a feral summation of endangered joys and communion that could be about love, friendship or, in the chorus, the old Seattle” MOJO , and the Italian fan encyclopedia PearlJamOnline likewise heard the “used to” lines as a possible nod to the 1990s Seattle music community that Pearl Jam has, in many ways, outlived pearljamonline.it . Louder made the same reading, hearing Vedder “looking back on the idealistic – yet often acerbic – scene that spawned them and acknowledging the loss and the pain the era left in its wake” Louder . For a band whose peers — Andrew Wood, Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell, Mark Lanegan — have died across the decades, the line “we used to believe” reads not as generic nostalgia but as the grief of survivors who have outlasted the community that made them.
The bridge and the resolve. The bridge sharpens the stakes with the album’s signature image, framing Pearl Jam — or their whole cohort — as possibly the last light of an era, before the narrator answers with a flicker of resolve. That resolution is where the song’s title pays off: to be scared of fear is to recognize the paralysis for what it is, and the song’s forward momentum enacts the choice to push through it rather than surrender to it. Kerrang! situated the whole track in the band’s mid-career “Avocado” mode — “a boisterous slice of their Avocado era” that “can be heard in the crunchy power chords of brilliant opener Scared Of Fear” — locating the song’s defiance in its music as much as its words Kerrang! .
The speed of the writing. One of the most striking facts about the lyric is how fast it came. Ament’s account has Vedder arriving at “the crux of the lyrics” within five minutes of the arrangement taking shape MOJO . For a singer notorious for wrestling with lyrics — the Binaural-era writer’s block is the stuff of Pearl Jam legend — the immediacy suggests the emotion was near the surface, waiting for a vehicle. Watt’s account confirms the same order of operations: Vedder “did his thing right then,” improvising the vocal in the moment rather than laboring over it afterward. That the lyric was essentially caught live, in the same take as the “maelstrom” performance, is part of why it reads as raw feeling rather than crafted narrative.
Crucially, the song is written to leave room for the listener. Loudwire noted that the opener offers “a chance for your own reflection — whether it’s contemplating the last few years since the release of Gigaton or something more personal to your life” Loudwire . The lyric’s refusal to name a specific loss is precisely what lets it hold so many — a broken friendship, a dead scene, a marriage, a decade, a self. This openness is a hallmark of Vedder’s best writing: like “Black” before it, “Scared of Fear” gives the listener a shape of feeling rather than a closed story, and invites them to pour their own loss into it. The specificity of the chorus verbs — laugh, sing, dance, believe — is universal enough to belong to anyone, while the surrounding verses’ anxious, unnamed questions keep the emotion from resolving into anything tidy.
Composition & Arrangement
After the atmospheric opening, the song snaps into a fast, muscular rock arrangement — one built for forward drive rather than the slow-burn dynamics of much of Gigaton. Louder singled out “the instantly recognisable opening jangle of Scared Of Fear, drummer Matt Cameron giving it that familiar colossal wallop to shock the whole thing into life” Louder . That “wallop” is the hinge of the arrangement: the ambient prelude and the billiard clack function as tension, and Cameron’s drum entrance is the release, dropping the full band into the riff at once.
The riff and the two-part structure. The song is built on a Gossard riff that, by his own account, was “a Stone two-parter” — an arrangement of two guitar sections that Vedder helped shape into repetitions SPIN (via Yahoo) . Kerrang! described the guitars in terms of texture and weight, hearing “crunchy power chords” at the song’s core Kerrang! , while Ultimate Classic Rock described “blurring guitars and an arena-made melody straight from their golden period” Ultimate Classic Rock . A track-by-track from Generation Mixtape summed the anatomy up as “a big riff, even bigger drums, and a blistering solo” riding a straight-ahead groove Generation Mixtape .
The solo as climax. The lead break is a concise, climbing Mike McCready guitar solo, and reviewers repeatedly flagged it as the arrangement’s peak. Louder described “Mike McCready’s Catherine wheel of guitar licks hogging attention unapologetically” Louder — a spinning, sparking image that captures how the solo throws off energy rather than settling into a single melodic idea. Structurally, the solo mirrors the rising urgency of Vedder’s vocal, arriving as the song’s dynamic ceiling before the track spirals to its end. This is a classic Pearl Jam move: a rhythmic, riff-driven verse-chorus body that opens up into a guitar showcase near the climax, the way “Alive” or “Life Wasted” does.
The prelude as callback. The ambient prelude reads to most listeners as a deliberate callback to the band’s roots; Generation Mixtape noted that “the ambient intro (and subsequent whip-crack) are a cool nod to the band’s ’90s heyday” Generation Mixtape , echoing Gossard’s own aim to “harken back to Ten” Songfacts . The same track-by-track drew an explicit structural comparison to “Life Wasted,” hearing in “Scared of Fear” the same pairing of reflective lyrics with an explosive, full-band entrance Generation Mixtape .
Dynamics. The arrangement’s dynamic strategy is simple and effective: near-silence, then a percussive detonation, then sustained full-band intensity that only relents for the solo’s ascent. There is no long fade or extended jam on the studio version — the song makes its point with velocity and gets out, an appropriately urgent way to open a record. Note that no reliably sourced key or tempo figure is available for the track, so this analysis describes its motion in listening-neutral terms rather than asserting a specific BPM or key.
Production & Recording
The song exists in the band’s timeline twice over. Its bones — and, per MOJO, the “maelstrom” performance itself — date to the very first sessions at Watt’s Beverly Hills home studio in early 2021, the day that also produced “React, Respond” MOJO Wikipedia . Those initial sessions took place in February 2021; the bulk of Dark Matter was then cut over roughly three weeks in 2023 at Shangri-La in Malibu Wikipedia . Watt’s method throughout was to keep the five members playing together live in a room, which gives the opener its raw, first-take charge — the reason it can plausibly be described as a “maelstrom caught” rather than assembled.
The live-in-a-room philosophy. Everything about the song’s production serves the goal of preserving a band performance rather than constructing one. Gossard’s account of Watt keeping “a guitar on the whole time” and everyone playing together SPIN (via Yahoo) describes a tracking approach closer to the band’s early records than to the layered, remote construction of Gigaton. That the album’s oldest recording is also its opening statement is fitting: the take that survives is the one that first proved the method worked.
Engineering, mixing, mastering. The album was engineered by Paul LaMalfa and Marco Sonzini Wikipedia , mixed by Serban Ghenea Wikipedia , and mastered by Matt Colton Wikipedia . Ghenea, a mixer best known for pop and hip-hop blockbusters, brings a modern, high-gloss clarity that sits interestingly against the band’s raw performances — the sleeker, more contemporary sheen Watt sought to marry to Pearl Jam’s classic grit.
The field-recorded pool break. The most distinctive production choice remains the field-recorded pool break: instead of a stock sound effect, the band used Vedder’s phone recording of an actual game with Sean Penn, whose credit as “pool cue” is one of the only song-specific personnel notes in the album’s liner credits Wikipedia . The decision to keep a rough phone recording rather than replace it with a clean studio sound is entirely of a piece with the record’s ethos: capture the real moment, warts and all, and let its human imperfection carry more weight than any manufactured effect could. PearlJamOnline’s account is specific about the provenance — Vedder captured “a ball hitting a billiard cue” on his phone during the game pearljamonline.it — which is why the album’s first sound is a recording of two friends at play rather than a produced sound design.
The prelude as production, not just arrangement. The ambient intro that precedes the pool crack was, by Gossard’s account, a considered production solution to a sequencing problem: without it, opening cold on the riff would have been “a dead start to set the table,” so the band built the little intro to ease the listener in Songfacts . That the prelude was credited to “Jeff and Andrew” SPIN (via Yahoo) is a small but telling detail about the collaboration: the producer and the bassist together shaping the album’s very first seconds, a hand-in-glove working method that defined the whole record. The result is a track that sounds live and spontaneous in its body but is carefully staged at its edges — a spontaneous performance framed by a deliberate entrance.
Themes & Motifs
The dominant theme is fear as isolation — the dread of watching a shared world dwindle. Several distinct motifs run through the lyric and the arrangement:
- The “used to” litany of vanished camaraderie. The chorus’s escalating list — laugh, sing, dance, believe — is the song’s central motif, a catalog of communal joys now spoken only in the past tense. It works both intimately (a lost relationship) and collectively (a lost scene), and its refusal to specify is what gives it reach MOJO .
- Fear of fear itself. The title names the record’s deepest subject: not a specific threat but the paralysis dread induces. The whole of Dark Matter spends its runtime trying to name and outlast that paralysis, and the opener is where the theme is stated most plainly.
- The setting sun. The bridge’s image of a final, fading light frames the band, or their entire cohort, as possibly the last of an era. That image is not confined to the opener: it recurs across the record and resolves in the closing track, “Setting Sun,” which trails off on Vedder’s plea “Let us not fade” Loudwire . Read together, the opener poses the question and the closer answers it, bookending Dark Matter with the same sun.
- Survivor’s grief. Underneath the personal reading is the collective one: a band that has outlived so many of its Seattle peers singing “we used to believe” carries the specific ache of the survivor. Louder’s reading of Vedder “acknowledging the loss and the pain the era left in its wake” makes that grief explicit Louder .
- Reconnection as resolve. Against the litany of loss, the song’s forward drive and the narrator’s flicker of resolve enact the album’s counter-argument: that the answer to fear is to reach back toward the people and joys the fear has cost you. The record’s arc — from “Scared of Fear” to “Setting Sun” — is essentially a movement from dread to defiance.
The deepest of these motifs is the one embedded in the title. To be scared of fear is to name a recursive trap: the thing to be feared is not loss, or aging, or the end of a scene, but the way dread itself freezes a person into inaction and estrangement. That framing turns the whole album into a kind of argument against paralysis. The “used to” chorus is what fear looks like when it wins — a life narrated entirely in the past tense — and the song’s refusal to stay there, its insistence on the driving beat and the climbing solo, is what resistance sounds like. Read this way, “Scared of Fear” is not a lament so much as a warning against surrendering to lament, which is precisely why it belongs at the front of a record whose title, Dark Matter, gestures at the unseen forces that hold everything together. The song insists that connection — the “communion” MOJO heard in it MOJO — is the dark matter that keeps a life, or a band, from flying apart.
Critical Reception & Legacy
Critics repeatedly flagged “Scared of Fear” as a statement-setting opener, and it became one of the most-cited tracks in reviews of an album that was itself warmly received — Dark Matter carries an 81 on Metacritic, denoting “universal acclaim,” and debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 Wikipedia Wikipedia .
Rolling Stone. The magazine used the song to open its review, quoting the “used to” chorus and calling it “the rocking opener from Pearl Jam’s 12th studio album, one of their best and most personal records ever” Rolling Stone . It framed the whole record — and the opener that establishes its tone — as the sound of “middle-aged men grappling with life and trying to make sense of it all — one anthemic chorus and seething guitar solo at a time” Rolling Stone .
Louder. Louder likewise led with the track, praising the “instantly recognisable” riff and Cameron’s “colossal wallop” while highlighting Vedder “looking back on the idealistic – yet often acerbic – scene that spawned them” Louder . It reserved its highest praise for the song’s completeness, calling it “the essence of Pearl Jam bottled, shook up and uncorked” Louder .
Ultimate Classic Rock and Kerrang!. Ultimate Classic Rock heard “an arena-made melody straight from their golden period” Ultimate Classic Rock , and summarized the album as one that “finds Pearl Jam wrestling shared doubts about the future” while more often than not claiming “a tentative victory” Ultimate Classic Rock — a verdict the opener sets in motion. Kerrang! called it a “brilliant opener” powered by “crunchy power chords” Kerrang! .
NME. In its four-star review, NME grouped the song with its companion track, praising the “explosive tracks ‘Scared Of Fear’ and ‘React, Respond’, which are not dissimilar from the classics in ‘Vitalogy’ and ‘Vs’” NME , part of what it judged “some of their strongest work in recent memory” NME .
The consensus. What unites these reviews is a rare degree of agreement. Where Binaural-era Pearl Jam records drew tempered, mixed responses, Dark Matter was met with something close to relief — the sound of a legacy band making a genuinely vital record rather than a dutiful one — and “Scared of Fear” was the track most reviewers reached for to make the case. It is a telling pattern: the opener is the song critics cite when they want to demonstrate that the album immediately reconnects with the band’s classic strengths. Ultimate Classic Rock’s framing of the record as one that “finds Pearl Jam wrestling shared doubts about the future” and claiming “a tentative victory” Ultimate Classic Rock is, in miniature, a description of “Scared of Fear” itself — a song that names dread and then out-rocks it.
The through-line across reviews is that the song deliberately evokes the band’s early-’90s sound while carrying a distinctly late-career weight of loss — a comeback that looks backward and forward at once. As the front door to the best-reviewed Pearl Jam album in years, “Scared of Fear” has quickly settled into the band’s reputation as a reliable set-early rocker rather than a hidden gem, and its critical standing is bound up with the broader consensus that Dark Matter marked a genuine creative resurgence. The album’s commercial performance reinforced the point: a No. 5 debut on the Billboard 200 Wikipedia confirmed that the record — and the opener that sets its tone — connected well beyond the critics.
Live Performances
Per setlist.fm, Pearl Jam first performed “Scared of Fear” on April 22, 2024 at their Seattle warehouse — the filmed “First Official Performance” — and had played it 31 times as a band by mid-2026 setlist.fm .
The 2024 tour opener. The full 2024 tour opened on May 4 at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, where the set actually began with “Wash” and “Scared of Fear” landed fifth, rather than as the show opener Ultimate Classic Rock . That Vancouver show was a dense showcase for the new record — a 25-song night that saw the live debuts of “React, Respond,” “Wreckage,” “Dark Matter,” “Upper Hand,” “Won’t Tell,” “Something Special,” and the album closer “Setting Sun,” with “Scared of Fear” the earliest Dark Matter cut in the running order Consequence . It was a night that made the band’s intent clear: the new songs, and this opener above all, would be load-bearing parts of the live show rather than obligatory album promotion.
A recurring early-set anchor. Across the tour the song settled into a role near the top of the set. At Madison Square Garden on September 3, 2024, for instance, “Scared of Fear” again appeared fifth in the running order, following “Pendulum,” “Better Man,” and “Immortality” setlist.fm (MSG 2024) . That early-set placement fits the song’s function: a high-energy jolt that reconnects the crowd to the new record before the set opens up into deeper catalog territory.
A launchpad for the new material. The Vancouver opener is worth dwelling on as a statement of intent. Rather than easing the new record in gently, the band front-loaded the night with Dark Matter cuts, and “Scared of Fear” — the oldest of them — led the charge as the first of the album’s songs to appear, at position five Ultimate Classic Rock . The show also debuted the album closer “Setting Sun” Consequence , meaning both halves of the album’s opener-closer diptych received live premieres the same night — the “setting sun” question and its answer introduced to audiences in a single set.
Live character. Live, the band typically compresses the ambient intro and drives hard into the riff, with McCready’s solo the reliable peak — the moment his “Catherine wheel of guitar licks” becomes a physical presence on stage rather than a studio flourish Louder . The billiard-clack cue, so central to the recorded version, is generally dropped or gestured at live, where the band simply counts the song in. Its steady placement near the front of the set across the 2024–25 tour — fifth in Vancouver, fifth again at Madison Square Garden that September setlist.fm (MSG 2024) — suggests the band views it as an early-set energizer, a way to plant the new record firmly in the show before reaching into the deeper catalog.
Covers & Reinterpretations
As a 2024 album track that was never a single, “Scared of Fear” has not yet entered the wider rock-covers repertoire, and no prominent artist is documented as having released a studio cover of it. The song is too new, and too bound up with Vedder’s specific vocal delivery and the band’s live-in-a-room performance, to have accumulated the kind of cover history that Pearl Jam standards like “Black” or “Alive” carry.
The only documented outside performances so far come from the tribute-band and cover-band world. Setlist.fm logs the song being performed by other artists in addition to Pearl Jam — its cross-artist total sits at 40 plays by three artists, including a rendition by the band Foxymop at The Boileroom in Guildford, England in June 2025 setlist.fm . These are cover/tribute performances rather than notable reinterpretations by established artists.
For now, then, the most varied and authoritative interpretations of “Scared of Fear” remain Pearl Jam’s own — the studio recording, the filmed warehouse debut, and the many 2024–25 tour versions that stretch and reshape the arrangement night to night. Rather than invent covers that do not exist, it is more accurate to say the song remains, to date, a distinctly Pearl Jam artifact.
Music Video & Visual Elements
“Scared of Fear” was not a commercial single, but Pearl Jam gave it two pieces of official video. An official visualizer was released to accompany the track YouTube (Pearl Jam) , its abstract, motion-driven imagery matching the song’s tension-and-release build rather than telling a story. Separately, the April 2024 warehouse debut was issued as a performance video, “Scared Of Fear (Live At The Warehouse / 2024)” Apple Music , capturing the band’s filmed “First Official Performance” of the song at their Seattle headquarters — a document that doubles as the song’s live debut and its most band-forward visual.
A further live capture from the Vancouver tour opener also circulated with dedicated tour visuals designed by longtime collaborator Rob Sheridan, whose projection work has become a defining element of the band’s recent stage design. Across all three, the song’s visual identity is consistent with its music: kinetic, performance-centered, and unconcerned with narrative — the sight of a five-piece band (plus, on record, an unseen pool table) hammering the song into life.
Personnel & Credits
Dark Matter’s credits are largely album-wide rather than per-song; the notable exception here is Sean Penn’s “pool cue.” Core contributors:
| Member | Role |
|---|---|
| Eddie Vedder | Lead vocals, guitar; billiard-ball field recording |
| Stone Gossard | Guitar (originating riff) |
| Mike McCready | Guitar (solo) |
| Jeff Ament | Bass; co-author of the intro |
| Matt Cameron | Drums, percussion |
| Andrew Watt | Producer; guitar |
| Sean Penn | Pool cue Wikipedia |
Engineering: Paul LaMalfa and Marco Sonzini Wikipedia . Mixing: Serban Ghenea Wikipedia . Mastering: Matt Colton Wikipedia . Producer: Andrew Watt. Label: Monkeywrench / Republic.
Fan Theories & Trivia
- A partner track. “Scared of Fear” and “React, Respond” were born the same first day, and Gossard confirms both “were done on the first day” SPIN (via Yahoo) ; fans often hear the sequence as a two-song statement of intent opening the album MOJO . NME paired them the same way, calling them the record’s “explosive tracks” NME .
- Sean Penn, session musician. The actor’s “pool cue” credit is a genuine liner-note entry, not a joke — the sound was recorded on Vedder’s phone during a real game pearljamonline.it .
- The oldest song on the record. Because it dates to the first 2021 sessions while most of Dark Matter was cut in 2023, “Scared of Fear” is effectively the album’s oldest recording — a fact fans often note when discussing how the Watt collaboration began Wikipedia .
- A Ten callback by design. Gossard has said the ambient intro was meant to “harken back to Ten”, and reviewers heard exactly that Songfacts Generation Mixtape .
- Community reading of the “scene.” Within Pearl Jam fan discussion, the “we used to believe” line is widely read as an elegy for the departed figures of the ’90s Seattle scene the band has outlived. This aligns with critics’ readings but is, in its most personal form, fan/community interpretation rather than a confirmed authorial statement pearljamonline.it .
Comparative Analysis
Pearl Jam have a long tradition of statement openers — “Once,” “Go,” “Breakerfall,” “Life Wasted” — and “Scared of Fear” fits that lineage while doing something new: it opens with texture and a sampled sound rather than an immediate riff, a staging choice Gossard borrowed in spirit from Ten Songfacts . The most direct catalog cousin is “Life Wasted” (2006), the Avocado-era opener that Generation Mixtape explicitly invoked in describing “Scared of Fear” — both marry reflective, mortality-tinged lyrics to an immediate, full-band detonation Generation Mixtape . Kerrang! reinforced the lineage, hearing the song as “a boisterous slice of their Avocado era” Kerrang! , while NME reached further back, hearing the classic-era crunch of “Vitalogy” and “Vs” in the song’s attack NME .
Where the song departs from those forebears is in its subject and its scale. The classic openers were often outward-facing bursts of energy or anger; “Scared of Fear” is elegiac, its velocity in service of grief rather than defiance alone. That makes it a peculiarly late-career kind of opener — one that Rolling Stone tied to “middle-aged men grappling with life” Rolling Stone , a phrase that would not fit “Once” or “Go” but suits a band three decades on.
Within Dark Matter itself, the song is best understood as the front half of a diptych with the closer “Setting Sun,” which returns to the same “setting sun” image and answers the opener’s question with “Let us not fade” Loudwire . And it stands as the leadoff evidence for Watt’s thesis about the whole album — his goal of wedding the band’s classic early sound to a more modern, widescreen production. In that sense, “Scared of Fear” is not just an opener but a mission statement: the first thing the band made with Watt Rolling Stone (feature) , the oldest recording on the record, and the clearest single distillation of what the collaboration was for.