The 90s were all about teenage angst, literally and in song. From Pearl Jam to Alanis Morissette, here are three songs from the 90s that were written by teenagers.
“Better Man” by Pearl Jam
“Better Man” by Pearl Jam is a song about a woman settling for someone, even though she might be able to do better. Apparently, this song was actually inspired by vocalist Eddie Vedder when he was just a teenager, inspired by his own mother’s marriage. Vedder’s father had died when he was younger, and he thought his mother remarried out of necessity. This song ended up going No. 1 on the Billboard Album Rock Tracks chart.
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“Sometimes I think of how far I’ve come from the teenager sitting on the bed in San Diego writing ‘Better Man’ and wondering if anyone would ever even hear it,” Vedder once shared with the Los Angeles Times.
“Criminal” by Fiona Apple
“Criminal” is actually Apple’s highest-charting single ever, and she wrote it when she was just 17. The music video for this song was a controversial one, and features an 18-year-old Apple stripping off her clothes and wandering around what appears to be some kind of prostitution ring.
Apple talked to Interview Magazine about what it was like to work with models as a teenager.
“Making the video was a huge step for me, personally, because I’m not comfortable doing any of that,” she admitted. “When we were shooting, there were all these female extras who are paid to be pretty. They tried to make me pretty, but that’s not what I do: I am paid to sing and perform. So I’m there, as insecure as ever, surrounded by all these dancer-models strutting around in bikinis. I had a stand-in and she was gorgeous. I was dying.”
“Perfect” by Alanis Morissette
Alanis Morissette wrote this one with producer Glen Ballard when she was just 19 years old. “Perfect” was a song that the young songwriter used when she auditioned for Guy Oseary at Maverick Records, who was apparently “blown away” by the song within the first “20 or 30 seconds.” It appears on her Jagged Little Pill album.
“The song is the plight of the overachiever,” she explained of “Perfect” to Spotify. “I had straight As as a kid and was on that end of the continuum, which is equally as traumatizing as the other end. We underfunction or we overfunction depending on what we think we can to best to survive. For me that survival was about chasing perfection and it was daunting. The pervasive message is that you aren’t enough and you’re innately bad, and I had to comment on it. I was sobbing on the ground when I wrote it.”
Photo by: Paul Bergen/Redferns