Songfacts®:

• This song deals with religion, what it's like being raised a Christian in modern day society, then losing your faith. Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder shared his thoughts in a 1998 interview with NME to promote the Yield album.
  
  "The word 'religion' has such bad connotations for me," he said. "It's been responsible for wars, and it shouldn't be that way at all, it's just the way the meaning of the word has evolved to me. I have to wonder what we did on this planet before religion."
• The title is misspelled - the correct spelling of the word is faithful. This could imply a fraudulent form of faith, or a new meaning of the word as a compound meaning full of faith. Or it could just be a spelling error - Eddie Vedder probably wasn't using a spell checker.
• Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready wrote the music for "Faithfull" one day when he got snowed in. He got some help from the band's other guitarist, Stone Gossard.
  
  "I called up Stone, and I played the intro part to him, and I played the heavier part to him," McCready recalled in Pearl Jam's book Twenty. "I was like, 'How do you put these two things together? Can you help me?' I played it over the phone to him, and he hummed how to do the transition. That was the first time I had called him to ask him for songwriting help. Stone is the most integral in our band in putting things together. He and Jeff [Ament] are very good at that. Stone is probably the master of it, and Jeff is right underneath that or right next to him."