Eddie Vedder - Earthling

[bada]

The Dark, Rose of Jericho, Brother the Cloud and On My Way would have made a nice EP or maybe just save them for the next PJ album.

[RockPusher]

Oh god until the fuck you part is he 15?

I had the same response until I got the lyrics that precede it and then it became a beautiful sentiment.

[Ms Harmless]

he was older than 15 when he wrote Ten

[bada]

Yeah but I was 15 so he got a pass.

[Ms Harmless]

I was not expecting such an astute response, respect

[Ms Harmless]

this performance of "Smile" is fantastic! it made me smile, but might be one of the few Earthlings performances I don't think is improved by Chad's drumming

[Ms Harmless]

"when the sun don't shine (it don't shine at all!)" is one of my favourite Ed vocal moments ever

[RockPusher]

Dang that’s a good smile. Pretty impressed with Glenn and Andrew on that one. Eddie has found something.

[epilogue]

the dark is way to low, but i love seeing picture so high

The Dark is a totally fine song but it just hasn't clicked for me like it has for others. I certainly don't dislike it by any means. But there are so many better songs on this album.

Maybe it's the Springsteen-ness of it all. I don't know.

[Ms Harmless]

Dang that’s a good smile. Pretty impressed with Glenn and Andrew on that one. Eddie has found something.

yeah I'm consistently impressed with Andrew's soloing

[RockPusher]

If I'm gonna hear the producer of the album playing an instrument, give me Watt's guitar over BO'B's piano 10/10

[McParadigm]

Been thinking about some of these songs over the last few days.

Invincible

I fucking love the paternal corniness of this song. The simplicity, warmth, and the abundance of kindness. The atmosphere. But I especially like the way it opens by speaking directly to you, sounding not unlike Dad playing a game of pretend with his child.

Opening a rock record by playing imagination games with your audience, addressing them like you're Dora the Explorer, is a move we all understand to be unhip. I think the message here is: who even cares anymore? Been there, done that. Got the corduroy jacket.

This is someone who spent a lot of the last 30 years chasing other people's acceptance...first by trying to fit reductionist definitions of cool, then trying to regain lost relevance, and finally just struggling to understand what his own audience wants from him. This is a song that feels done with all of it, and that makes it the perfect start to this record. It can look backwards without trying to relive the past. It can grow old without needing to cover for the passage of time. And it can talk to its audience if it enjoys doing so...in fact, because it enjoys doing so.

This song is an invitation. You've grown up, kid, but hey...we can still play pretend if we want to. Here's an invisible boarding pass.

It's for you, so feel important.

Good and Evil

The flip side to Invincible. One of the most vicious things he's ever written, with a churning musical undercurrent that salivates with the want to hurt.

I think that's why it makes some people wish (wrongly [you're stupid]) that they could hear mid-90's Ed sing it, and why some others (wrongly [you're stupid]) compare it to Vitalogy.

These are targeted and sometimes hateful lines. Coming from a young man with an audience of millions, whose own shit is in no way together, it would have felt...I dunno. Gross. And it would also have been the eighth thrashy yell song of the night. Listen to this fucking furious song I wrote. Now listen to this other furious song about how turntables are cool.

The context of that era, where the songs still wanted to lift up but were collapsing under a terrible weight, would have defanged the song's snarling aesthetic. And the 'there's a human being in my sights' lyrics would have been poisonous to the surrounding music's pleas for the dream to somehow survive all this ugliness.

Coming in as a part of 57 year old EV's output, sitting near jaunty Elton John duets and crooning love songs, the song's unhinged qualities are exceptional to their surroundings rather than ordinary...and that imparts an authenticity on the burst of aggro snarl. This is no longer a sound or style that he routinely writes in, and this isn't a Comatose-style attempt to recreate that aesthetic in order to fulfill an artistic ambition. This feels like something that just exploded outward.

The expressed wish for the antagonist to glimpse their own death is all the more astonishing because Eddie Vedder has spent a lifetime uncovering anger, abuse, struggle, and redemption in his writing without it really coming to this. His fucking divorce record is mostly about self-reflection, for fuck's sake.

I love the performance of it, too. That shriek at the end (lifted up by the production, I'll admit) gives me chills.

Try, Picture, Mrs Mills

I dunno, man. Learning there were three special guest star tracks right at the end of the record really drove home for me that I wasn't going to like it...especially with the first single being a Tom Petty tribute. I thought, 'here we go...a whole record of Ed the classic rock cypher and sycophant. Can we just not?"

But not only do I like these...I realllllly fucking like Try.

Mrs Mills is probably the weaker of the three for me, but they're all good fun. Not exactly cool, but we've covered that. And in the case of both Stevie and Elton, Ed's rediscovered joy of just fucking playing your ass off seems to be wonderfully contagious. Instead of celebrity retirement 'safe space' music, we get the same "gave a child a rootbeer" sugar rush that infects all of the playing on the record. 1 2 3 4!

[Strat]

please keep going!

[Ms Harmless]

fuck sake I lost a post, I am not Oscar Kilo

anyway it basically said nice writeup McP and particularly on Invincible, which looks on the surface like "I'm the king of the fookin' world" Bono but actually has a lot more warmth and "gather round, listen" familial intimacy than that

[Ms Harmless]

glad to see "Picture" is climbing for people; I mean, the only thing I can compare it to other than Elton is something Jools Holland would enjoy, and I always enjoy that stuff while I'm watching Jools Holland, simply out of a love of good musicianship, but don't seek it out otherwise; in any case, I can't be mad that it's here and I wouldn't dream of cutting it

[Ms Harmless]

I definitely enjoy Long Way more when I sing along with Harper's part

[RockPusher]

Anyone else hear some shared DNA between this section of Mind Your Manners and Good and Evil:

Go to Heaven
That's swell
How do you like it
Livin' Hell

[Ms Harmless]

these nights with the sky so full of stars!

[Ms Harmless]

Anyone else hear some shared DNA between this section of Mind Your Manners and Good and Evil:

Go to Heaven
That's swell
How do you like it
Livin' Hell

yup I hear this! G&E is better though

[tragabigzanda]

pearl jam sucks now