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Sat 5 September 2026 16:00, UK
Eddie Vedder never wanted to settle for a decent performance every time Pearl Jam put on a show.
Every single one of their songs had a piece of himself buried deep within it, and he was going to do everything that he could to make the show feel exciting, even if that meant putting his life in jeopardy more than a few times in the band’s early days. But if you look at the kind of bands that Vedder was listening to when he was a kid, playing the best show that he could was the least that he could do.
He was one of the world’s biggest Who fans when he was a child, and there aren’t that many people who can listen to a record like Live at Leeds and who put together a halfhearted performance afterwards. Pete Townshend was looking to open people’s minds, and the only way to do that was to have those moments where every note sounded like it was powerful enough to level any venue to the ground.
Vedder didn’t need to focus on volume all that much, though. He was more interested in getting the audience to respond based on pure emotion, and it’s not like Ten is lacking in emotion by any stretch. You could hear him bearing his soul on a lot of those early songs, and even when the band started to become much bigger than anyone thought, Vedder was going to do everything in his power to double down on the caustic side of his music.
Vs. was the closest thing they ever did that resembled a punk album, but aside from the heavy vocals and the maniacal guitar riffs, Vedder was still interested in songwriting above everything else. Compared to Stone Gossard’s endless well of riffs, Vedder was much more interested in painting everyone a picture with the same cowboy chords that almost sounded like they were taken from the heartland rock playbook.
Which makes a lot of sense considering how much of a fan Vedder was of Tom Petty. A lot of what he heard out of the Heartbreakers helped get him through his middle school years, but he felt he had a transportive experience listening to The Last Waltz for the first time. The Band was definitely becoming one of the biggest names in music, but to see them bowing out with such grace, along with one of the best songbooks in rock, left a huge impression on him.
Pearl Jam were already about keeping things authentic, and Vedder felt that everything he ever needed to know about songwriting came from studying what every musician in that movie was playing, saying, “The Last Waltz, and all those people in that movie. There was Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Ron Wood, Muddy Waters, and Van Morrison. All these people just kind of got ingrained in my head as being just great.”
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And it’s not like you could find better songwriters than the ones that he just listed. Van Morrison was already a friend of The Band well before they called it a day, but hearing Neil Young sing tunes like ‘Helpless’ and even having Eric Clapton sit in on a couple of songs was like a team of musical superheroes coming together to make some of the greatest music that anyone would ever hear.
Admittedly, Pearl Jam doesn’t usually sound anything like the bands that played on The Last Waltz, but that was never Vedder’s intention, either. The major thing he learned from the film was that all audiences cared about was people who told a story, and the least that he could do was put a little bit of himself into every song that he sang whenever he and his friends put together a new album.
