June 21: Eddie Vedder in New York City

June 20: Eddie Vedder on Late Show with David Letterman

Check your local listings.

Malfunkshun DVD News

The long awaited DVD project, Malfunkshun: The Andrew Wood Story, is about to see the light of day. This was posted today on the project's official Facebook page:

July 19, 2011 is the official RELEASE DATE for my film "Malfunkshun - The Andrew Wood Story". 10 years in the making and 6 years in the waiting.

It will be released on DVD in a Boxed Set along with "Melodies & Dreams" the Andrew Wood solo album, and Malfunkshun's "Return to Olympus".

A sincere THANK YOU to the family, friends and fans...

Pearl Jam Twenty Documentary: A First Look

Entertainment Weekly has what they call a first look at Cameron Crowe's documentary, Pearl Jam Twenty, in their June 24th issue.

The above picture is not included in the documentary but is instead described as a behind the scenes look. EW's Jason Adams has this to say about the film:

It’s been nearly 20 years since Crowe first put the members of Pearl Jam on the big screen as a fictional Seattle band in Singles. Now, in the documentary Pearl Jam Twenty (due this Fall), he’s taking a look at the band’s real-life accomplishments in their two decades together. Crowe (left, with frontman Eddie Vedder) tells EW, “People who’ve seen the movie tend to say one of two things: (a) When can I see the band play live again? or (b) Did we really look like that in the ’90s?

Not much in the way of news, but it sure has me excited to see this thing.

June 18: Eddie Vedder in Hartford

June 16: Eddie Vedder in Boston

A Guided Tour of Vs.: Leash

(A Guided Tour: Vs.)

LEASH

Leash is a far more important track (that doesn’t necessarily make it a good track, mind you) on Vs. than we often give it credit for. Leash, moreso than Indifference, represents the culmination of the journey taken, the growth experienced on both Ten and Vs.. From the start Vs. is an album under siege, a sheep penned in and painfully throwing itself against the fence that confines it. Though it may not understand why it is trapped, who built the fence, what gave its captor the right to do it, or how to escape, it senses that its anger is just—somehow more righteous for the fact that its questions go unanswered. But the final quarter of the record, excepting the misplaced Rats, makes great strides both in trying to understand and escape. Rearview Mirror affirms that the subject has been a victim, and that he deserves better. Small Town confirms that they may have been victimizing themselves, that the harm we can do to ourselves through our own static lives, through fearing our dreams, is every bit as real, every bit as damning. But the judgment is softened with the sympathetic realization that we deserve more, even if we haven’t allowed ourselves to experience it. The key insight in Small Town, however, is the recognition that really living, true emancipation, is not something that can be done alone. Perhaps we can start the journey alone, as the subject does in RVM. But it can’t end that way.

That is the message of Leash, easily the most ecstatic, exuberant sounding song in the main catalog. I love how the song creeps up on the listener, starling them out of the reverie of Small Town (and in a lot of ways more artfully done that the quiet LOUD quiet LOUD approach of No Code). It’s not surprising that the first thing we hear from Eddie sounds like a startled yelp. There’s fear, but there is also catharsis, joy, and relief—like walking through a haunted house with good friends and knowing that everything you experience (the laughter and the fright) is both more intense and somehow more pure because you’re together. Little moments like this punctuate the song (like Eddie’s high pitched squeak and playful growl going into the second verse). Eddie sings like his heart is going to burst, but these are complicated screams that seem to exist in both past and present, with elements of the ragged survivor that becomes much more prominent in later songs. They release long held tension, but they celebrate the fact that he CAN scream, and that there is an audience listening that understands, that wants to scream too. The fact that it’s being done together is what matters. It’s not surprising that the Leash chorus/outro has some of the most prominent backing vocals in any Pearl Jam song.

Musically Leash sounds like a party, which makes sense that it’s largely what it is. Hearing the song live really reinforces this. Of all the early songs in the catalog this is one of the few whose meaning and feeling hasn’t changed over the last 20 years. The music is loud, crowded, grinds along, filled with playful moments (especially the transitions between verses (see the 54-60 second and 1:19-1:22 for instance) and notes that are chiming and happy for all their grit (listen to the music in the ‘drop the leash’ outro). There’s also an expansive recklessness to Leash, a looseness that isn’t present many other places on these early records. Ten and Vs. are tightly wound, coiled records. Leash feels free and sloppy, unguarded in a way that was really new for them at this point. The last lyric Eddie sings is ‘get out of my fucking face’ but he speaks it almost casually, like he knows he’s said it and more importantly , knows that others have heard, agreed, and above all else understood, so there’s no reason to scream anymore. Perhaps there isn’t even anything left to say, but that doesn’t mean we want the feeling to go away and Leash ends with the most triumphant solo this side of Alive to let us revel in this moment a little while longer. The song comes to a full stop, rather than a fade, which is significant, but we’ll get to that with Indifference.

Lyrically Leash is a mixed bag. There is an innocence to it that I find charming and appropriate for this song, but it’s easy to imagine why, especially on the surface, a lyric like ‘drop the leash, get out of my fucking face’ or ‘drop the leash, we are young’ can sound immature—especially since Ten, Vs, and Vitalogy normally handle the theme of alienation with much more subtlety and grace (compare ‘drop the leash, we are young’ to the magnificent ‘all that’s sacred comes from youth, dedications naive and true’). But the context matters (this is also why I think the lyrics for The Fixer work fine), and it would be a mistake to expect Leash to sound like Not For You. For all its energy Leash is not an angry or reflective song. It is immediate and celebratory, and even though Eddie is screaming these words, he’s not screaming them in anger. You certainly can’t call this self-parody. Eddie thinks the message is important, especially the ‘delight in our youth’ lyric. But the over the top ham fisted chorus, the black and white nature of the chorus, speaks to the purity of youth and the freedom that comes from certainty and simplicity. Leash wants us to hold onto that even as the world grows more complicated and we are forced to adapt. Even as life shackles us, even as we find ourselves bound and our movements limited, we need to hold onto what it felt like to be free, since this is what will help us navigate this much more complicated world. It is what will enable us to adapt how we live rather than change who we are, to forgive the world its imperfections without abandoning our principles, to live in the world rather than outside it, which may be the only way to resolve the adversarial alienation running through Vs.
That’s not to say there aren’t bad lyrics here. The second verse is unnecessarily vague ’Young lover I stand/It was their idea, I proved to be a man/Take my fucking hand/It was their idea, I proved to be a man’ could be about anything and is so seems to be about nothing. The liner notes seem to indicate that this is about getting someone pregnant, but that makes no sense in the context of the rest of the song. And as I said above ‘delight in our youth’ and ‘drop the leash we are young get out of my fucking face’ is perhaps excusable given the context, but that doesn’t make them well written. But Leash also features some of my favorite moments in the early catalog appearing in Leash. The bridge ‘Will myself to find a home, a home within myself, we will find a way, we will find our place’ is well done, and encapsulates both the themes of the song, the record, and the band itself. We author our own salvation (will myself to find a home, we will find a way), that what we’re really looking for is peace, some kind of stable ground where we can make a life for ourselves and discover who we are (a home within myself, we will find our place) but at the same time it’s a We that is doing this. If the only person occupying that space within yourself is yourself it’ll never be a home. It’ll be a prison. There is no peace without love. If there is one consistent message running throughout Pearl Jam’s music that’s it. The promise of Leash, the promise if of the music, is that if we search we will find it, and that we do not have to search alone. And while ‘drop the leash, we are young’ might be a bit cringeworthy, I am more than willing to forgive a song that gives us the magnificent ‘I am lost, I am no guide, but I’m by your side. I am right by your side.’ There are other songs that define the band: Alive, Rearview Mirror, Corduroy, Given to Fly, I Am Mine—but there are no other lyrics that better capture who they are, and why the music is so important.



OTHER SONGS IN THIS SERIES:
Go
Animal
Daughter
Glorified G
Dissident
W.M.A.
Blood
Rearviewmirror
Rats
Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town
Leash
Indifference


OTHER GUIDED TOUR SERIES:
Vitalogy
Binaural 
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Eddie on Letterman, June 20

This coming Monday, June 20th, Eddie will be strumming his uke as the musical guest on Letterman!  The show starts at 11:35pm ET.  Check your local listings.

June 15: Eddie Vedder in Providence

New Song by Mike McCready and Danny Newcombe

Shadow reunion?  Well, not quite yet, but you can listen to a brief acoustic guitar and organ instrumental by Mike McCready and Danny Newcombe of the bands Goodness and Shadow here.






Have I mentioned that I @#$%ing love Mike McCready's Tumblr?

Mike McCready Works on "Horrible Bosses" Score

It looks like Mike is continuing to expand his scoring work for TV and movies.

The upcoming comedy “Horrible Bosses” has a pretty outrageous premise—three dudes decide to help each other kill their bosses. So appropriately, the soundtrack is going to be just as…eclectic.

Film Music Reporter reveals that composer Christopher Lennertz (”Marmaduke,” “Alvin & The Chipmunks,” “Supernatural”) has enlisted some pretty interesting talent to help score the film. Frequent Beastie Boys collaborator Money Mark (keyboards), Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready and session/touring musicians Dave Levita (Eminem, guitar), Chris Chaney (Jane’s Addiction, bass), Stefan Lessard (Dave Matthews Band, bass), Victor Indrizzo (Beck, drums) and DJ Cheapshot (Linkin Park, turntables) have all combined forces for the score of the film. Let’s hope it not as spazzy as that sounds. But seriously, we doubt they’re all together at once and it’s likely different combos are pairing up for various tunes. It’s a pretty interesting approach—certainly one that isn’t done very often—so we’ll be curious to see how it all turns.

Our First Look at PJ20 The Book

Italian fan site, pearljamonline.it, isn't saying where they got their hands on a marketing preview of Pearl Jam Twenty, but they are posting pictures of it on-line.

The back cover gives a broad description of the book and the marketing plan for PJ20.

Published in celebration of Pearl Jam’s twentieth anniversary and in conjunction with Cameron Crowe’s definitive documentary film and soundtrack of the same name, PEARL JAM TWENTY is an aesthetically stunning and definitive chronicle of their two decades as a band—by the band itself. 

In 1991, Pearl Jam’s debut album, Ten catapulted the little-known Seattle-based band into superstardom. Then, at the height of their popularity, the band shunned the spotlight, refusing to shoot videos or do interviews. Even as Pearl Jam’s studio albums continued to be critically acclaimed and commercially successful, selling over 60 million albums worldwide, the inner workings of the band—their day-to-day routines, influences, and motivations—remained unknown even to their diehard fans.

Twenty years later, this is their story. PEARL JAM TWENTY is a treasure trove of behind-the-scenes anecdotes, rare archival memorabilia, and the band’s personal photos, tour notes, and drawings. Told with wit and insight in the band members’ own words, and assembled by veteran music writer Jonathan Cohen with Mark Wilkerson—and including a foreword by Cameron Crowe along with original interviews with legends and contemporaries like Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Dave Grohl—this intimate work provides an in-depth look at a group of musicians who through defying convention established themselves as “the greatest American rock band ever” (USA Today Readers’ Poll 2005).

2011 will be a yearlong celebration of Pearl Jam's rich twenty-year history. The festivities kick off with the January release of a new live compilation album, Live on Ten Legs, followed by the srping rerelease of the band's sophomore and junior releases, Vs. and Vitalogy, in new, deluxe formats. Cameron Crowe's film Pearl Jam Twenty will premiere at the end of summer into early fall at select film ?? worldwide and the Pearl Jam Twenty book and soundtrack will be released simultaneously. The film will then have a staged rollout including theatrical release, TV broadcast, and DVD release for the holidays. Pearl Jam's twentieth anniversary year will ?? be filled with a wealth of other surprises from the band, live performances and more.

In the Studio via Smartphone and Twitter

Thanks to Mike, we know that Pearl Jam has been hammering out their new album.

Hi Brendan O'Brien!

Second from the left ... is that Matt?

But now that Eddie is, no doubt, preparing for his tour which kicks off next week, it looks like the guys (or Stone and Matt, at least) are stepping up the recording of their side projects.

@theeshawnsmith Workin with Stone and Regan in the studio. New rock glory!

"This is the best I could do. Regan already went home."

And we've been hearing blips out of Chris Cornell about the status of the new Soundgarden album. This week he told New Zealand Herald reporter, Scott Kara, that they're almost done.

@scottkara Just interviewed Chris Cornell. Nice chap. Still recording "sonic aggressive" new Soundgarden album but nearly ready he reckons.

Alone In This Together

Star Anna and the Laughing Dogs will be releasing their third studio album, Alone in this Together, on July 12th.  Listen for Mike McCready on the title track.  If you like what you hear, pick up the album, or if you're in Seattle, catch a performance at Easy Street.  No word yet on whether Mike will be performing at Easy Street.

A Guided Tour of Vs.: Elderly Woman

ELDERLY WOMAN BEHIND THE COUNTER IN A SMALL TOWN

(A Guided Tour: Vs.)

Elderly Woman is the first mature song to appear in Pearl Jam’s catalog, at least if maturity reflects the ability to critically reflect from a great distance, and to soften the temptation for judgment with the wisdom that comes from experience. Prior to this Pearl Jam’s music was exceedingly immediate and frequently judgmental (which, when you feel like judging, is very satisfying). Eddie’s songs about other people were at least in some ways songs about himself, the working out of demons through characters. In Small Town we have something different.

The beginning of the song is startling, if only because there is, for the first time in the catalog, no prelude. There is no build. We jump right into the story. Perhaps life was the prelude. Perhaps a slow build requires time that a wasted life can no longer furnish. For a gentle acoustic song there is a strange subtle urgency to it. There is something about the music that sounds like it may burst without realizing it. This is a song about lifetimes, and that is a lot for one song to contain. The whole band deserves credit for the effect—the richness of the acoustic canvas, the subtle ways Mike colors it in—each fill reflecting a wasted opportunity or a dream revived only to fade away again-- crowding the song without drawing attention away from the story, the depth provide by jeff’s bass, the effectively understated drums from Dave, the texture provided by the keys, a novelty at this point in their career, but one they wisely avoid drawing attention to. There is a confidence to the music, as if it has already proven everything it could possibly need to prove, and so simply needs to do what the song requires without ego or aspiration.

But the real star of this piece is Eddie. Pearl Jam’s music is always written to act as a platform for his vocals, but this is one of the only times (at this point) where the band really gets out of the way to leave him in the spotlight all by himself. The evocative title sets the scene (and unlike Rats, doesn’t spoil the surprise). We have an older woman, beaten down by life, by roads not traveled, chances not taken, dreams deferred. This is a song about standing still while the rest of the world passed you by, and a chance at redemption. But rather than judge or self-identify, as he does everywhere else on the record , here he stands apart while offering sympathy and forgiveness—refusing to condemn someone for not being able to overcome what so many of us cannot. Part of the process of maturation is learning not to resent people for their inability to transcend who we are, and that happens here.

Like RVM, this is a song about vision—learning to see (or see again) what has long been hidden, and hopefully finding the courage to act on it. But RVM reflects only on its past, and even there it reflects only on its pain. It does not think about its future, as the song climaxes in the triumphal moment of release, of sight restored. It exults in the possibilities of a new future without taking the time to think about what they are. Elderly Woman is about a similar experience, reflecting on a life of static drift rather than pain, but again fixated on the moment of realization. The details are a little fuzzy, but that doesn’t matter since the song is about the experience, not the setting. In the 18 years I’ve been listening to this song I’ve imagined it as the woman spotting an old photograph of herself, confronting an old acquaintance, seeing echoes of who she was in someone younger, even hallucinations—looking into a polished countertop and seeing a youthful reflection or having herself literally confronted by the ghost of who she was—the same conceit I hate so much in Off He Goes. The power of the song comes in part from the fact that this choice doesn’t really matter. It’s a secondary detail that the listener can fill in whatever way is most moving to them.

Where RVM is an epiphany, a singular moment where everything becomes clear, Elderly Woman is hazy and uncertain. There is no thunderbolt, no eureka moment of inspiration and clarity. The song starts out trapped in gauzy recollections. The hesitantly phrased ‘I seem to recognize your face/haunting, familiar, yet I can’t seem to place it. Cannot find a candle of thought to light your name ‘--a wonderful lyric, with its intimations of light and heat, awareness and passion. It’s the experience of having a name on the tip of your tongue and being unable to access it—something that gets even more frustrating the longer it lasts, and as she quickly realizes, this has been lingering just below the surface for a lifetime. The song slides into a kind of wistful regret ‘lifetimes are catching up with me, all these changes taking place, I wish I’d see the place, but no one’s ever taken me.’ These hurts are too old to kindle immediate pain, but in some ways they’re all the sadder for it, for their passivity and sense of loss that encompasses a lifetime. That passivity is important—the feeling that this person has been a victim for her whole life, someone the world acted upon, instead of her acting upon it. She waited for someone to show her what’s there, rather than go seek it out herself, and no one ever came.

The gentle decay of the chorus ‘hearts and thoughts they fade…fade away’ punctuate this. Like the rest of the song its delivery is effectively understated, more melancholy than it is angry or bitter or even sad—emotions too immediate for the song and the subject. Elderly Woman is not a crime in progress, nor are we exploring its aftermath. Eddie is filtering ages through his voice, visiting long abandoned ruins, disturbing their forgotten slumber with unwanted intrusion. If we cannot reawaken it, better perhaps to let it lie.

The second verse speaks to an increasingly determined desire to recapture what was lost, if only it could be sustained. Recognizing a face can be done at a distance, or it can be filtered through a picture or a memory. Breath is something close, something intimate, something right in front of you. There is a gradual reawakening, as what was forgotten is slowly remembered ‘memories like fingerprints are slowly raising’. There’s a gasping moment of shame, as if she could only see what she’s become by holding herself up to the mirror of past aspirations, coupled with self-pity and self-awareness that she’s at least partly authored her present condition (although she still casts herself as a victim). ‘Me you wouldn’t recall, for I’m not my former. It’s hard when you’re stuck up on the shelf. I changed by not changing at all, small town predicts my fate, perhaps that’s what no one wants to see.’

There is a moment when we think she might escape the gravity of her past and start over. ‘I just want to scream ‘Hello!’ My god it’s been so long, never dreamed you’d return. But now here you are, and here I am.’ It is certainly the emotional climax of the song, both lyrically and in terms of the delivery. The question is does she recapture what she lost, or is this just temporary? I’m inclined to think she loses the moment. She holds herself back, like she always has. She just wants to scream. She doesn’t do it. But probably more than anything how you read the song turns on whether or not you think she is alone with her memories or literally confronted by someone from her past. I think she’s alone, and that’s the key. Memories aren’t enough. There needs to be someone on this journey with you. We can rarely overcome the inertia of our habits, our small town, our passivity, our fear (see Dissident) on our own. Engaging the world around you, engaging your dreams, requires someone there with you—someone to draw on for strength when you stumble and someone to share the feast of your triumphs. Instead the song closes with the fading out repetition of the chorus, as the hearts and thoughts fade away once again. What was awoken could not be sustained, because it was alone.




OTHER SONGS IN THIS SERIES:
Go
Animal
Daughter
Glorified G
Dissident
W.M.A.
Blood
Rearviewmirror
Rats
Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town
Leash
Indifference


OTHER GUIDED TOUR SERIES:
Vitalogy
Binaural 
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