"Earthling": Eddie Vedder's new solo album

Two weeks short of his 57th birthday, Eddie Vedder is the very model of the middle-aged mixed-up kid. During early summer, he began recording Earthling, his third solo album, with Andrew Watt, the Grammy winning producer of Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus. In late September, he premiered two of its songs at Ohana, the festival he’s curated at California’s Doheny State Beach since 2016.

Ohana also saw Pearl Jam’s return to live action, their first run of shows since a scheduled 2020 tour in support of their eleventh album Gigaton became an early casualty of the Covid pandemic.

“Been travelling a lot,” Eddie nods. “We played the new record for some people over the weekend, the first time in a while I’ve travelled without carrying 50 lbs of books and papers and lyrics. Some of the lyrical content is heavy too, so I was wondering it that added to the weight of the bag.”

Vedder is no stranger to heavy. Born Edward Severson in the Chicago suburbs, then relocated to San Diego as a preteen, he was four months old when his parents divorced, and grew up believing his stepfather to be his father and his biological father a family friend. Upon learning the truth at 17, he took his mother's maiden name. This thorny origin story became the basis for Alive, the first song Vedder wrote for the nascent Pearl Jam in October 1990, after his drummer friend Jack Irons had recommended him to Seattle proto-grunge scene alumni Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard, whose band Mother Love Bone had ended when singer Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose.

So began a 30-year odyssey, which saw Pearl Jam catapult to fame on the back of 1991 debut album Ten's stew of trad rock grandiloquence and Gen-X angst, plus a relentless touring ethic and MTV ubiquity. The weight sat unhappily with Vedder, a shy man hiding inside a dramatic baritone, but even as 1993's Vs sold a scarcely fathomable 950,000 copies in its first week, he was plotting a withdrawal. Pearl Jam made no more videos, gave no interviews, kicked back against Ticketmaster, and reconfigured their music toward an ascetic hardcore mysticism, reducing sales yet nourishing a sense of collective integrity, while also stoking a devoted fanbase via officially sanctioned bootlegs of their legendarily epic shows. These deep bonds saw them through the trauma of 2000’s Roskilde Festival, when nine fans died in a crush during Pearl Jam’s set.

Today’s Eddie Vedder has found a happy accommodation between his private and public selves, a dude who can call Bruce Springsteen and Fugazi’s Ian MacKave friends, as comfortable hanging with the Cosmic Psychos as Barack Obama. “All that’s sacred comes from youth,” he sang in Pearl Jam’s 1994 song Not For You, a punked update of the teenage Vedder’s first love, The Who, and an imperative he’s upheld throughout. “Certainly,” he chuckles, “if there’s more than one life, this has got to be the best one.”

Now, his new solo album Earthling was released on January, 14.