Eddie Vedder says Pearl Jam’s surprise run with “Last Kiss” did more than send a cover into the charts. It restored some faith in the old idea that a song can still break through on its own, even in a pop market crowded by manufactured acts and louder trends.

That mattered because Pearl Jam was no longer a young upstart chasing grunge momentum by 1999. It was one of the original bands still active after Kurt Cobain’s 1994 death, with Soundgarden and Alice in Chains having gone on to another album after the scene’s peak and with the charts now shaped by Britpop, nu-metal, R&B, hip-hop and polished pop. Against that backdrop, Vedder’s reflection lands as a small but clear measure of what success looked like for a band that had already started to feel like part of the durable canon.

Vedder said he did not like to condemn something he did not understand, and that restraint framed the way he described “Last Kiss.” The song had begun as a live recording from Pearl Jam’s Constitution Hall soundcheck in Washington DC during the 1998 tour, then was handed out as a Christmas single on 45 vinyl to a small number of friends and fans. The band spent only a few thousand dollars to mix it, treating it as a low-key release rather than a push for the mainstream.

That modest approach makes the song’s path more striking. “Last Kiss” was originally a Wayne Cochran number first cut in 1961 and later turned into a massive hit by J Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers, but Pearl Jam’s version did not become a full single until radio rotation carried it there in June 1999. By then it had also appeared on No Boundaries: A Benefit for the Kosovar Refugees, a compilation that helped raise $10 million for Kosova relief, giving the track another route into public hearing.

The friction in Vedder’s comments is that Pearl Jam was already close to the kind of legacy status that can make pop success look irrelevant. Yet he said the response to “Last Kiss” was uplifting because it showed a song could still cut through without dancers, a video or any of the usual machinery around a hit. He said it helped him feel that all was not lost, at least in their world, and the numbers backed him up: the single climbed to number two on the Hot 100.

That is the answer inside the surprise. The song did not catch on because Pearl Jam suddenly chased the market; it caught on because radio found room for a stripped-down recording that had first been shared like a gift. And for Vedder, that meant one thing: a good song still had a chance, even when the rest of pop was moving in a very different direction.