Saturday, November 9, 2013

Ed's New Music "So Good" You'll Never Get To Hear It?



Earlier this year, we reported that Eddie was penning new music for the soundtrack of Out of the Furnace, a movie directed by Scott Cooper that debuts today at the AFI Fest.  Full disclosure, we may have fallen prey to an IMDB editing hoax, but nonetheless, Ed DID write original music for Out of the Furnace.  Eddie so enjoyed the movie that he re-recorded Pearl Jam's song, Release, for the movie and then went so far as to record some more original songs that Scott Cooper originally used in the movie.  According to Scott Cooper, they are incredible.  So incredible, that he took them back out and replaced them with score.  

What?  Why?  Here it is in his words via HitFlix:
It's never Cooper's intention, he says, for anything to ever pull the audience out of the world on the screen. He wants no fingerprints, his or otherwise, on the film. He doesn't like anything too affected present, and whether it's a performance or a music cue or just something that doesn't seem like it fits into the world, he's always looking to strip away and find an essence. So as much as it pained him, the original material couldn't find a comfortable home in the film and it was decided, mutually, that score would be a better fit.

"It was a very difficult decision to make because any time someone goes to those depths to write something that's that beautiful and that personal and that meaningful to him, and to me, you want it to fit into the movie," Cooper says. "Eddie has such a rich voice, but what makes it difficult is his voice is much like Bruce's. It's unmistakably Eddie Vedder. The second you hear that voice you know, 'Jesus Christ, that's Eddie Vedder.' And even if I was using it as a needle drop in the film, if Christian were driving down the road and he turned on the radio and here's this Eddie Vedder song, again, it was just so powerful. I know it sounds odd but it was so powerful that it took me out of the narrative."

Ultimately, both Vedder and Cooper felt the songs were best left as unearthed relics of the creative experience rather than seeing any sort of commercial release alongside the film. "They're very personal songs to Ed and to me," Cooper says. "I forged a close relationship with him through the movie and it's probably better kept between us. Sad to say, for Eddie Vedder fans, as we all are."
Why would Ed's songs be better left as "unearthed relics?"  You'll be hard pressed to find a Pearl Jam fan that can explain that.  Is it wrong to hope those songs leak one day?  Well, I'm off to confession.