"The Fixer" is about male/female relationships. Speaking to the Toronto Globe and Mail, lead singer Eddie Vedder said: "Men, we all think we can fix anything. It's not necessarily a good thing. In a relationship, a woman will say 'This is wrong,' and we're like, 'I'll fix that, don't worry about it, we can fix it.' These wonderful people, the woman you're in a relationship with, they don't want you to fix it. They just want you to listen to what's happening: 'Don't fix it, I want you to own this with me – feel it.' This is a reminder song to me, to stop fixing."
This was the first single from Pearl Jam's ninth album, Backspacer. It's one of the most radio-friendly songs from the band, running just under three minutes with lyrics that are uncharacteristically direct. It charted at #56 in America and helped the album debut at #1, their first chart-topper since No Code in 1996. Pearl Jam's next album, Lightning Bolt, also went to #1.
The band enjoys tremendous support from their dedicated fan base; none of their studio albums have charted lower than #5.
The song has an unusual 6/4 time signature, the mark of drummer Matt Cameron, who wrote the music (Vedder penned the lyric). Cameron was a longtime member of Soundgarden before joining Pearl Jam in 1998.
Pearl Jam released the
Backspacer album on their own Monkeywrench label. Without major-label distribution, they cut deals with various corporations to promote and distribute it. Target was the exclusive megastore retailer, selling the CD for the low low price of $11.98. The target deal was promoted in a
commercial directed by Cameron Crowe showing the band performing the song at The Showbox in Seattle. This footage was used to make the song's music video.
The target deal was a major factor in the album debuting at #1.
The band rolled the song out in stages, building anticipation along the way. The first time they performed it was on May 28, 2009 for the Target commercial; a low-quality bootleg soon started circulating.
A 30-second clip was played on the Major League Baseball All-Star game, July 14, 2009, and on July 20, the single was officially released, with the album following on September 20.
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This song became the foundation for Backspacer after Vedder came up with an edit of an arrangement the band worked up without him. "Ed's job is sort of to make sense of all the unfinished material we bring in," Matt Cameron explained in the Pearl Jam book Twenty. "We know he's such a gifted lyricist, that we feel fine handing him over songs that aren't quite finished."
Guitarist Stone Gossard offered his take on the lyric in an interview with Billboard: "My personal interpretation is that it's about how [Vedder] makes our songs work. When someone inspires him, he's an incredible collaborator."
Vedder made this retort: "I read something Stone said in relation to the band, and he might be right to a certain extent. If it were to be about the band, then it would actually be more about each different song. But that's not fixing; that's just directing it somewhere. I'm thinking more on a worldview or a community view. I read this quote from Rick Danko, maybe from before The Last Waltz. He said, 'We used to think with music that we could save the world, but now we're old enough and wise enough to know that all we can change is our community.'"
In his Billboard interview, Stone Gossard explained how this song came together: "With that song, Matt came in with a riff and we worked out a few different arrangements. Then Ed took it and re-arranged it with Pro Tools, to get the parts he needed in the right place. You don't want to get a final arrangement for a song before he's had a chance to screw around with it, because once he gets it, it can all change. What you thought was a chorus can end up being a verse. There was a real collaborative effort on the whole album. Ed, in particular, worked with everyone on their songs."
Gossard added: "It was Ed that really made the arrangement of the song. Matt had two or three more parts. When you don't have a vocal, you just put it all in there and hope for the best in terms of your arranging skills. Literally we went away and left Ed with it the night after we recorded it, and he came back with this three-minute pop song. He probably cut half the parts out and re-arranged it."
The album title is a typewriter reference. On very old typewriters, the "backspace" key is labelled "backspacer."
Eddie Vedder is intrigued by typewriters; at the end of the 2000 Pearl Jam album Binaural you can hear him banging away; there's also some typewritten text in the liner notes.
On a typewriter, if you made a mistake, you'd hit the backspace (or backspacer) key and type over it, so there'd be a record of your error. Using a typewriter makes you think through your keystrokes more carefully.
Backspacer was produced by Brendan O'Brien (Bruce Springsteen, Rage Against the Machine). O'Brien has collaborated with the Seattle band before, having manned the boards on several of their 1990s albums. The two parties first reunited in 2008 to record a cover of the Who's "
Love, Reign O'er Me" for the soundtrack to the Adam Sandler film
Reign Over Me. Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament told
Billboard magazine: "Brendan works really fast. He's a super pro. I've always felt, working with him, that he understood me as a bass player and that's not always easy. A lot of producers are there to please the singer. But I've always had a great rapport with him. I can tell him I want something to sound like the O'Jays or Led Zeppelin or PJ Harvey and he gets it."
In Rolling Stone's 2009 Readers' Poll, this song was voted the Best Single of the year. In a double whammy for the Seattle band, Backspacer scored Best Album.
