Songfacts®:

• Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron wrote the music, with Eddie Vedder adding the lyrics. In a Sonicnet interview, Vedder said: "There's a lot of momentum in it. I couldn't sit down and write to it, so that was when I'd take it in the car and just go for drives - the open road thing. So it felt like I was evacuating. The theory behind the song, which I've probably done four times already, is getting out of a situation. 'Rearviewmirror' might be the same song. But it's time to make a change - it's a song about change." >>>

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  Saint - New Orleans, LA
• "Evacuation" was the first Pearl Jam songwriting contribution from Matt Cameron, who joined the band in 1998 after his band Soundgarden broke up. The song is filled with shifting time signatures that made it challenging to record.
  
  "Drummer tunes don't make sense," Cameron said in Pearl Jam's book Twenty. "They're rhythmically weird. There's no way a guitar player could come up with a drummer tune."