Songfacts®:

• "Last Exit" is one Pearl Jam song Eddie Vedder has steadfastly refused to explain. It seems to be about death, but could also be about rebirth. Typical of his lyrics, there's lots of nature imagery, with the ocean dissolving away his past and the sun burning away his mask.
  
  One thing we do know is that the song isn't about Kurt Cobain, who died by suicide on April 5, 1994 but wasn't found until three days later. In "Last Exit," Vedder sings:
  
  Three days, and maybe longer
  Won't ever find me here
  
  This is just a strange coincidence; the song was written in 1993, long before Cobain's death.
• Along with "Tremor Christ" and "Nothingman," "Last Exit" was one of the songs Pearl Jam recorded with producer Brendan O'Brien at Kingsway studios in New Orleans. These session were very productive and had a great flow. PJ bass player Jeff Ament told Songfacts: "That's the beauty of writing a song in the room with the band: We were all influencing each other in how we were playing. That's a good memory. Those three songs are really great-sounding tracks. We made pretty good music in New Orleans."
• This is the first track on Vitalogy, Pearl Jam's third album. They got off to a hot start with their 1991 album Ten, a massive seller and creative triumph that changed the course of rock. Their follow-up, Vs., was also huge, so they took advantage of their clout by releasing Vitalogy with elaborate packaging and putting it out on vinyl two weeks before it came out on CD.
  
  The album was designed to open like a book Eddie Vedder came across called Vitalogy (the study of life) from 1899. The book is filled with all kinds of quackery that was plausible in those times, complete with illustrations. A lot of the actual book was used in the album. Here's some of the text:
  
  We know little of the life of early mankind, but we are reasonably sure that some lived to be 500 and up to 900 years of age.
• Pearl Jam started playing this song in November 1993, a year before it was released on the album.