Songfacts®:

• This song finds Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder trying to save friends from their addictions and their demons. The band is from Seattle, where drug addiction claimed the lives of many of the band's friends and cohorts. Kurt Cobain, who was Pearl Jam's nemesis in some ways, was the most famous casualty, but other losses include the rockers Stefanie Sargent and Mia Zapata, and Andy Wood, who fronted a band with future Pearl Jam members Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament called Mother Love Bone.
• In the Pearl Jam Twenty book, this song is described as "the tale of a mutually detrimental love-hate relationship." It's a band composition, credited to all five members.
  
  In the book, guitarist Mike McCready explains that it started with a riff he brought in. Drummer Matt Cameron really got into it, pounding away so hard his headphones came off in the middle of the take.
• "Save You" was the second single from Pearl Jam's Riot Act album, following "I Am Mine." Two key events shaped their direction since their previous album, Binaural, in 2000. First, there was the Roskilde Festival tragedy on June 30, 2000, when nine fans in the crowd were killed in a crush. Then there was the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The band didn't tour in 2001 and detoured into various side projects, with guitarist Stone Gossard becoming the first member to release a solo album (unfortunately on 9/11). When they got back in the studio, they had a lot on their minds and a lot of material to work with.
• Eddie Vedder drops a few F-bombs in the lyric, which he felt were necessary to make his point. The band didn't make a clean version, but the kind of radio stations that played new Pearl Jam songs in 2002 weren't all that worried about a little profanity, especially when delivered in Vedder's muffled tones.
  
  Vedder did have to censor the song when they performed it on The Late Show with David Letterman, so he substituted "cuff" for "f--k."
• The band dedicated the Riot Act to The Who's John Entwistle, The Ramones' Dee Dee Ramone and jazz double bassist and cellist Ray Brown, all of whom died just a few months before the album was released. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Bertrand - Paris, France
• Pearl Jam made a performance video for this song and four other Riot Act tracks at a two-day shoot with director James Frost at a Seattle club called Chop Suey. These were their first videos since the animated "Do The Evolution" in 1998, and the first with the band on camera since "Oceans" in 1992.