Released on August 27, 1991, "Ten" (named after Mookie Blaylock's jersey number) contained eleven tracks dealing with dark subjects like depression, suicide, loneliness, and murder. "Ten"'s musical style, influenced by classic rock, combined an "expansive harmonic vocabulary" with an anthemic sound. The album was slow to sell, but by the second half of 1992 it became a breakthrough success, being certified gold and reaching number two on the "Billboard" charts. "Ten" produced the hit singles "Alive", "Even Flow", and "Jeremy". Originally interpreted as an anthem by many, Vedder later revealed that "Alive" tells the semi-autobiographical tale of a son discovering that his father is actually his stepfather, while his mother's grief turns her to sexually embrace her son, who strongly resembles the biological father. In this lyric, even though Vedder originally looked at "being alive as a curse," as the sadness the speaker in the song suggests, "...But as fans quickly turned the title phrase into a self-empowering anthem, particularly at Pearl Jam concerts, Vedder said, "they lifted the curse. The audience changed the meaning for me," he told VH1 Storytellers in 2006.