Setting Sun: The Song That Makes Seattle Cry

The setting sun, as real as it may seem, is rising elsewhere.

That is the reality I’ve been forced to face, knowing that something ingrained in me is, in the eyes of others, unimportant—or just unknown.

Back before Seattle became the epicenter of coffee culture and technology, the trendy metropolitan area with the country’s fourth-largest per-capita GDP was an almost Rust Belt town.

In the 1970s, Boeing shed tens of thousands of local jobs, and the city of Seattle, attempting its best impression of Detroit, lost 11 percent of its residents.

Recovery, as we now know, was written, and the hard times would become a distant memory.

For some, however, the hard times were more than a mere asterisk—they were defining.

In the span between Boeing’s hiccup and the tech-based revival, lives were lived, and America had a front-row seat.

The show, of course, was known as grunge, a marketing term that captured the potpourri of alternative rock, punk, and metal. From that amalgam were born some of the greatest bands the country has known.

While the artistic pedestal may not always hold up to analysis of individual components, the whole was far greater than the sum of the parts. It was, in other words, art in its most authentic form.

The bands went on to become household names: Soundgarden, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Alice In Chains. They moved albums. They altered fashion trends. And, in the case of my generation, they formed the soundtrack of our lives.

But much like the economic window that provoked the angst, the run would be short-lived.

Kurt Cobain, the face of Nirvana, died by suicide in 1994.

Eight years later, an emaciated Layne Staley, lead vocalist of Alice In Chains, was found dead in his apartment.

In 2017, Chris Cornell, the frontman of Soundgarden, hanged himself at a hotel.

Mercifully, through repeated tragedy, we can still claim the poet, the one whose way with words has brought tears to even the most stoic among us.

That man—Eddie Vedder—and Pearl Jam have yet to retire the canvas.

In 2024, the band released Dark Matter, its 12th—and remarkably skillful—studio album.

And on that album, the last track, fittingly, says it all.

Lyrics are open to interpretation, but I make out only one thing.

***

Held the dream you would stay with me ’til kingdom come

Turns out it was more like hit and run

Am I the only one hanging on?

***

Oh, if you could see, yeah, what I see now

You’d make your way to stay somehow

***

We could become one last setting sun

Or be the sun at the break of dawn

Let us not fade

Let us not fade

***

Yes, much of Seattle has moved on.

In fact, many in the city may have nothing to move on from, seeing that thirty-somethings came of age well after grunge. To them, setting sun may refer simply to a westward glance over Puget Sound.

But there is a group of Seattleites still listening. They hear a gifted man, one who has seen more than just the passage of time, and one whose words tell stories they don’t want to fade.

With mist in my eyes, I hear him, too.

All lyrics courtesy azlyrics.com