Songfacts®:

• This Eddie Vedder-written song was inspired by a book, a talk with an actress, and one late night. The Pearl Jam frontman explained to the Toronto Globe and Mail: "It's about a conversation with Catherine Keener, and a book – I think it might have even been called Unthought Known. I got back late to my hotel in New York, and I pushed it that extra hour. I pushed the limits of how much you can drink and smoke, and this song came out of it. I think the thought of the song is that there are things that you know, and they're in us, but we just haven't thought of them. But they're there, and we base decisions on them."
• Pearl Jam made an extremely low-budget music video for this song at their July 20, 2010 show in Berlin, where they set up a Mac laptop and recorded the performance. They had some fun with the credits, listing "Wes C. Addle" (Eddie Vedder) as director and crediting Bernard Shakey (Neil Young) with "concept."
• "Unthought Known" is part of Pearl Jam's Backspacer album, released on their own label, Monkeywrench. They made a deal with Target to promote the album in a commercial featuring the first single, "The Fixer," that sold a lot of CDs and helped the album debut at #1 in America, their first album to hit the top spot since No Code in 1996.