Songfacts®:

• Eddie Vedder wrote "I Am Mine" in reaction to the June 30, 2000 Roskilde Festival in Denmark, where nine fans were crushed to death while Pearl Jam was playing. It threw the band into a funk - even though they did nothing wrong, they were horrified by the event and struggled to find a way forward. Eddie Vedder wrote the song in his Virginia Beach hotel room during a rainstorm on August 2, 2000, the night before their first show after the incident. He was hoping that something positive could come of the catastrophe, and saw it as a reminder to cherish the lives we've been given:
  
  I know I was born and I know that I'll die
  The in-between is mine
• The song wasn't released until 2002, two years after the Roskilde Festival, so many fans believed it was about a more recent tragedy, the September 11 attacks, especially the line, "And the meaning it gets left behind, all the innocence lost at one time."
• In Pearl Jam's compilation Twenty, Eddie Vedder shared his thoughts on moving forward from the Roskilde tragedy. "In order to honor all the lives that were lost, you do something positive with it, and I think that's what some of the families have done, and that's what we tried to do," he said. "It made you appreciate your situation in life. It made you appreciate families who lose their kids as soldiers in war, because you felt it up close. You knew how it affected this immense multitude of people that were family and friends."
• There are two other tributes to the Roskilde victims on the Riot Act album: The song "Love Boat Captain," and an interlude called "Arc," where nine loops of Vedder vocalizations represent each of those killed.
• "I Am Mine" was the first single from the Riot Act album, recorded in early 2002 after the band took a hiatus for most of 2001, with each member taking on various side projects. Between Roskilde and 9/11, it was a trying time for the band, and it wouldn't have been surprising if they extended that hiatus indefinitely. But the time away from each other recharged them creatively and made them appreciate their special chemistry even more. "You go away from your first love for a while and then you fall back in love with your first love – over and over," bass player Jeff Ament told Songfacts. "That's happened with Pearl Jam, certainly."
• The band promoted this song by performing it on The Late Show With David Letterman and with a music video - surprising because they hadn't made one since 1998, and that one was animated! ("Do The Evolution," drawn by Todd McFarlane).
  
  They got over their aversion to miming in music videos by shooting it live with director James Frost at Chop Suey, a club in Seattle. During the two-day shoot, they made similar videos for their songs "Save You," "Love Boat Captain," "Thumbing My Way" and "Half Full."
• Pearl Jam played "I Am Mine" live for the first time at Neil Young's Bridge School Benefit on October 21, 2001, a year before the song was released. They played it the next night at the Groundwork benefit in Seattle, but then didn't play it again live until September 2002.