 Many of the songs are written from the point of view of a protagonist , which emerged from an early idea of turning the record into a concept album - as guitarist Stone Gossard explained , " we did consider using narration to thematically unify the album , but ultimately a less conceptual structure just felt right . " Vedder added that using characters in the tracks helped with the themes , as the stories could " transmit an emotion or a feeling or an observation of modern reality rather than editorializing , which we 've seen plenty of these days " . 
