Songfacts®:

• "Pushin' Forward Back" is one of the most popular songs from Temple Of The Dog, which formed as a one-album project in the wake of Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood's death in 1990. Mother Love Bone's Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament teamed with Wood's good friend and former roommate, Chris Cornell, to lead the project, adding guitarist Mike McCready and drummer Matt Cameron (Cornell and Cameron) were both in Soundgarden.
  
  Chris Cornell wrote the lyric, which in his typical fashion is abstract and open to interpretation. The meaning depends on your choice of punctuation:
  
  "Pushin' Forward, Back" implies pushing both forward and back.
  "Pushin' Forward Back" means forward is getting pushed back.
  
  Sadly, we'll never know what Cornell had in mind - he died in 2017 at 52.
• Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament wrote the music for this one, which has some interesting time signatures. In a Songfacts interview with Ament, he explained how it happened: "Stone came up with that riff that was in seven, and I think I wrote the second part to it – a little bit of a change. Playing that sort of riff with Matt Cameron and with Chris was awesome. We knew that they could handle the odd time signatures in a really spectacular way."
• Temple Of The Dog played just one concert, performing at the Off Ramp in Seattle on November 13, 1990 before the album was released. The most enduring song from the album is "Hunger Strike," where Eddie Vedder teams with Cornell on the vocal. Vedder had recently joined Ament, Gossard and McCready in the band that would become Pearl Jam. Matt Cameron ended up joining the group in 1998.