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You Probably Think This Song Is About You
When your name is immortalized as the title of an iconic hit.
I’ve always thought I deserved a better song. I mean, my name deserved a better song.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate that it got one in the first place. Pearl Jam couldn’t have picked a better name for the anti-hero of its best-known song, if not its biggest hit (Billboard Hot 100 peak: number 79).
I’m a sucker for names with two syllables that end in “N,” but I can’t imagine the tragic antihero of “Jeremy” being anyone with a name other than mine. Would Nathan have had the same ring had he been the one who spoke in class today? Or Brendan, Ryan, Justin?
Probably not. Though I like to think of us as being gentle and sensitive, incapable of violence of any kind, a guy called Jeremy was the perfect one to go postal in the 1992 grunge classic.
I consider Jeremy lucky to have been the standalone title of a bigger hit than more common male names like Michael and Tom. Boy names actually get lucky like that much less regularly than girl names, which songwriter Stevie Nicks has paid tribute to at least six times, in “Alice,” “Greta,” “Jane,” “Juliet,” “Rhiannon,” and “Sara.”
