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13 posts tagged Pearl Jam
Trailer: Cameron Crowe’s Pearl Jam Documentary
Writer/director Cameron Crowe’s “love letter” to Pearl Jam will arrive this fall in the form of a new documentary covering their humble beginnings, “the chaos that ensued soon-after their rise to megastardom, their step back from center stage,” and the Seattle rock band’s entire 20-year career up to the present. Aptly titled Pearl Jam Twenty, the film, which was compiled from over a thousand hours of rare footage, will premiere on PBS on October 21.
While a teaser clip pointing out the band’s early name change from Mookie Blaylock has been floating around for months, the promising official trailer arrived today, revealing that the film includes an interview with frontman Eddie Vedder conducted by David Lynch. Check it out above.
Video: Eddie Vedder - “Can’t Keep”
“I’ve lived all this life like an ocean in disguise,” sings Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder in the opening cut off his new solo album, Ukulele Songs. “I don’t live forever, you can’t keep me here.” What better setting for his trademark baritone’s self-reflective connection to the untamable sea than a tiny island off the coast of Hawaii? A perfect fit for Vedder’s miniature Hawaiian acoustic 4-string and powerful voice. Enjoy the new official clip for “Can’t Keep” — complete with dramatic aerial shots of Vedder serenading the crashing waves and windswept cliffs — above.
Meanwhile, you can buy the 16-track LP, an impressive collection of original songs and classic covers (including a duet with Cat Power we shared last week), on iTunes and/or stream the set on MOG.
There’s still no word on when those new Cat Power songs we heard in February will arrive in studio form, but in the meantime, the latest recording with vocals from Chan Marshall just arrived: “Tonight You Belong to Me,” an old standard from the 1920s that was famously performed as a duet in The Jerk by Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters, not to mention Fiona Apple and Jon Brion, among others. For this take, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder invoked Navin Johnson’s ukulele-backed take for a cut off his new solo album sparsely starring said Hawaiian acoustic instrument, aptly dubbed Ukulele Songs. Today, you can stream Vedder’s full LP, which also includes a guest spot by Glen Hansard, over at NPR. We singled out the Cat Power duet below:
You certainly shouldn’t bet on Jónsi showing up at the Academy Awards in his epic headdress for a performance of the Sigur Rós frontman’s How To Train Your Dragon theme song, “Sticks and Stones,” as my favorite Oscar shortlisters rarely make it to the nomination round, but I will be crossing my fingers that he or one of the other select few interesting contenders will beat out the likes of Justin Bieber, Avril Lavigne, or Owl City for a nod.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that the Oscars announced the 41-song shortlist for a potential Best Original Song award today. Jónsi’s awesome tune, Eddie Vedder’s “Better Days” from Eat Pray Love, Metric’s “Eclipse (All Yours),” and Beck/Devendra Banhart’s Life During Wartime theme all made the cut. Check out the full list here. (In case you were wondering, yeah, Randy Newman is on there… again.) Meanwhile, I’ll be giving my two favorite tunes from the list another spin below:
Watch: Neil Young and Pearl Jam - “Walk With Me” (Bridge School Benefit)
Not only did Neil Young perform with Buffalo Springfield for the first time in 38 years at his annual Bridge School Benefit over the weekend, but the Godfather of Grunge joined Pearl Jam for an inspired take on Le Noise opener “Walk With Me,” as well. Watch some good footage of their live collaboration above (via Speakers in Code). Also: Neil and Pegi Young danced onstage in honor of their late friend Larry “LA” Johnson, and it was adorbs.
While the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has inspired a ton of outrage (and rightfully so!) over the past 45 days, directed primarily at the company responsible for the disaster, BP, a certain grunge band from Seattle has been raging against the Big Oil behemoth for years. As the Phoenix New Times pointed out last week, Pearl Jam were so angered by BP’s pollution of the Great Lakes back in 2007 that they performed an original protest song during their headlining slot at Lollapalooza.
As Eddie Vedder knows, the best protest anthems consist of a simple, repeated rhyme, hence his band’s tune, “Don’t Go: BP/Amoco,” which features a basic chord progression behind a chant of the title words with increasing intensity (other lyrics include “no no no no no no…”). Stream Pearl Jam’s anti-Big Oil song below (starts around the 1-minute mark):
Watch: Pearl Jam + Band of Horses’ Ben Bridwell Play “Hunger Strike”
Over the weekend, So Much Silence and Crumbler posted this wonderful performance of Temple of the Dog’s grunge hit, “Hunger Strike,” in which Pearl Jam graciously invite Ben Bridwell of (tour openers) Band of Horses to sing Chris Cornell’s original part with ex-Temple member Eddie Vedder. Bridwell may be on a roll here in the cover song department, but it sure isn’t going to his head. As Kevin and Casey noted, only those with a heart of stone could resist saying “aww” at the post-performance hug with Vedder, not to mention his reminder to the headlining act’s massive crowd: “Pearl Jam’s the best band!”
Throw on an old flannel shirt and check out this recent take on one of the best rock songs of the ’90s above.
As we previously reported, many famous rock musicians and a songwriter for Sesame Street were outraged late last year when news broke that their music had been used to torture inmates at Guantanamo Bay. Whereas Drowning Pool’s Steve Benton said it was “an honor to think that perhaps [their] song could be used to quell another 9/11 attack or something like that,” Trent Reznor, Rage Against The Machine, and many more were understandably furious.
Now Reznor and Rage’s Tom Morello have joined the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo, along with R.E.M., Pearl Jam, the Roots, Rosanne Cash, Rise Against, Billy Bragg, and Jackson Browne, Huffington Post reports.
After thirteen years without a number one debut on the charts, Pearl Jam “put a bit of fixin’ on it” and landed the number one spot on the Billboard 200 this week with Backspacer. I’m not normally one to following the charts, but it’s no small feat to steal the crown from Jay-Z these days and Pearl Jam’s last time as the king of the charts goes way back to 1996’s No Code.
Jimmy Fallon is finally starting to tear a page out of Conan’s book by having lots of great musical guests. Check out the reformed Sunny Day Real Estate perform classic Diary track “Seven” here. Also, I’m actually starting to enjoy the awkward onscreen audience of Fallon’s show, especially when they’re trying to find a good head-bopping beat to The Dirty Projectors.
Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz will be producing and making a cameo in the upcoming film Freeloaders, a comedy from the team (Broken Lizard) behind Super Troopers and Beerfest. Get more info over at Spinner.
We’ve got lots of cool posts on the way for later today, but if you missed our late night item on Thom Yorke’s new percussionist, you may want to go thataway for a few more deets on the upcoming LA shows.
It’s no secret that Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder is an outspoken, politically conscious dude, a grunge rocker from Seattle who doesn’t mince his words and won’t sit idly by when the system—in his opinion—is broken. As Vedder would say (via Backspacer’s first single), “I wanna put a bit of fixin’ on it.”
Vedder got a lot more specific, however, on his relationship to politics in a recent interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica’s Giuseppe Videtti. He contends that it’s a musician’s duty to use art as a form of protest, adding that he learned this tradition from Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Townshend, Neil Young, and the Clancy Brothers. The 2004 presidential election was really where the political inspiration for Backspacer began, though. Here’s what Vedder said (English translation via GrungeReport):
The Democrats called the Boss, Ben Harper, James Taylor and the Dixie Chicks to support Vote for Change. Who played for the Republicans? A pair of country & western singers that Bush held to the leash.
When Bush was re-elected I could only think: ‘Fuck Americans, because you are badly informed and based your vote on values that I cannot accept. You believe that George Bush can still be just man after four years of his diabolic administration?’
Vedder adds that the election of President Obama restored his hopeful spirit and inspired the writing process for Backspacer, which drops on the 20th exclusively at Target.