Opera was the confluence of three streams of art: music, poetry and storytelling. It has been said that if Richard Wagner were alive today, he would be a director of movies. Richard Wagner was an inhabitant of the 19th century, and he was a maker of operas. He is known historically as a composer, but he wanted most to see a "complete art work"-he went as far as to invent a term in German that means "complete art work"-and opera was supposed to be this for him, because it combined music, literature and image. Movies have the same ingredients, between the soundtrack the screenplay and the cinematography.

The acting-singing talent connection has long been established, from Sinatra and Elvis to Madonna and Jennifer Lopez. According to the VH1 television show "before they were rock stars", Eddie Vedder, the singer for the Seattle rock band Pearl Jam, originally pursued a career in acting. Post finding fame, he played a minor role in "Singles", a film about the Seattle music and dating scene. Vedder is himself dramatic. His head shakes in the music video "Jeremy", in which he story-sings about a boy of the same name whose "daddy didn't give attention to the fact that mommy didn't care", until "king Jeremy the wicked" commits suicide in front of his class at school.

Though the songs all appear on the band's debut album "Ten", no mention is made of their connection on that album and they are not in order. But they are presented by some very diligent fans, who offer a cohesive story of the creation of the opera.

Briefly, the story is, "One who is wronged and does wrong becomes a criminal and ends up in jail." There is incestuous Oedipal drama, insanity, and loud and cagey guitaring. The most important contribution that Vedder makes to our social psyche comes from his statement, quoted from Rolling Stone on the web page, that he made his character become a serial killer when he heard about a real killer of prostitutes in San Diego and felt that he himself identified with that man: "I think that happens more than we know." Behavioral crimes and crimes against women and the "sick" people who commit them are, in real life, deliberately obscured. "Normal" people do not like to illuminate darker societal activities, because there are patterns at work which reverberate deep into the heart of the everyday. It is valuable that Vedder dramatized this pattern in popular music. Making the story a trilogy of three seemingly unrelated songs emphasizes the seemingly unrelated, or, at the very least, misunderstood pathological patterns that exist in human beings.