Which is handy, as Ringo Starr plays drums on it. Part music history lesson, part love letter, Ed tells the story of artists who’ve used the titular piano at Abbey Road Studios, including The Beatles. Its gleeful piano rock in turns tees up Mrs Mills: a song about a piano that rocks. – unite for the free-spirited duet Picture. Another comes as Eddie and Elton John – Goodbye Yellow Ledbetter Road, etc. The brilliant Try features Stevie Wonder delivering a wild harmonica solo over a scrappy punk riff. There are a number of contenders for Earthling’s most WTF!? moment. Special credit here must go to producer/instrumentalist Andrew Watt (Miley Cyrus, Ozzy Osbourne) for shepherding all of this musical roving in such a glorious fashion. All of the musical spontaneity may well alienate some, but its eclecticism is its greatest asset. In case you haven’t got the gist by now: there’s simply no way of knowing where Earthling is going next – be it in sound or mood – at any given time. Both, it should be stressed, come directly after the hushed elegance of The Haves. Rose Of Jericho pairs a choppy riff with references to Henry David Thoreau while Good And Evil ends with a blast of fuzz that will rattle your speakers. If this all sounds very pleasant, such instances are counterbalanced with serrated rock. Excellent lead single The Long Way, for one, summons the late, great Tom Petty, and even enlists Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench. Indeed, this is a record that plays like Eddie’s soul is plugged directly into a jukebox skipping through different eras of music history. “The special guests come out at the end,” he told the New York Times of how he deployed Elton John, Ringo Starr and Stevie Wonder on an album that also features Red Hot Chili Peppers alumni Josh Klinghoffer and Chad Smith, not to mention his daughters Olivia and Harper on backing vocals. Welcome aboard Air Vedder, people.Īhead of its release, Eddie spoke of constructing Earthling’s tracklist like a concert. It’s all a grand precursor to one of the most uplifting rock songs in recent memory. ‘ Are we clear? Cleared for liftoff… Are we affirmative… No negatory!’ he says like an overly-eager pilot before the drums crash in. As opener Invincible rises from a bed of keyboards, we hear him not singing, but rather talking. It takes all of about 10 seconds of listening to his latest brilliant extracurricular outing, Earthling, to realise he’s very much ’Ed-ing in a different direction here. To date, the Pearl Jam legend’s two solo excursions have been exercises in quietude, the first being the searching beauty of 2007’s Into The Wild soundtrack, the other the tranquilised beach-core of 2011’s Ukulele Songs. I hadn’t thought about the attitudinal side.You probably think you know precisely what Eddie Vedder’s new album is going to sound like. That’s probably one of the things that bummed him out the most. "You couldn’t argue that he wasn’t the figurehead of that whole thing. If he would’ve totally embraced all that stuff, it might have made me think, like, you better embrace this, too. But I think that his attitude made it OK to feel that way because he was the guy in the biggest spotlight. "To hit it as close as I can: that was naturally how we felt," Vedder responded. "I’m grateful for those or those phone messages or being in the same room every once in a while, but it would be offensive to claim that I knew him more than I did." But Marchese suggests that Cobain's sceptical attitude to the music business could have been influential on Vedder and Pearl Jam's own attitude to fame. I think that attitude made it OK to feel that way because he was the guy in the biggest spotlightĮlsewhere in the interview Vedder was asked by journalist David Marchese about the influence Kurt Cobain had on him, and Pearl Jam.
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