Songfacts®:

• It's amazing Eddie Vedder didn't shred his vocal chords singing this one. It's one of his more visceral performances, with a lyric about all the blood he's given in service to Pearl Jam. His beef was with the media and the music industry as a whole, which conspired to make him the spokesperson for the grunge movement and, by proxy, for his generation. His protests only fueled the fire, making him even more genuine and interesting.
• The song started with a riff Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard came up with. "At that time, he was writing a lot of those kind of riffs – super note-y," bass player Jeff Ament said in a Songfacts interview. "If you listen to a lot of those songs from that time, the big melodies that are going through those riffs are parts that I had written. He's playing almost every note in the riff, so you just try to come up with some way to articulate the riff that he's playing in a way that you hope that Ed can wrap the lyric around."
  
  "That's the main thing that I remember about 'Blood,'" he added. "How do we give this thing a more simple melody that Ed can feel strongly enough about that he'd want to put words over it? And I was really obsessed at that time – bass-wise – with going back and forth between an almost super-low-end dub sound and a super-aggro overdriven sound. That song really shows that from a bass standpoint – it's going back and forth between those two sounds."
• Vedder added the lyrics after the track was written during recording sessions for the Vs. album. It was the band's second album, the follow-up to their dazzling debut, Ten. They upgraded to a fancy studio in San Rafael, California, with lots of amenities. The musicians in Pearl Jam were able to put together lots of interesting tracks, but they outpaced Vedder, who had to come up with lyrics to all of them on his own. He retreated, and at one point disappeared, overwhelmed and feeling uneasy in the high-end studio. "Blood" was one of the first lyrics he wrote for the project - he's clearly venting his frustration.