Eddie Vedder touches the right emotional chords when he sings

Eddie Vedderthe frontman of Pearl Jamin addition to his activities with the band, he has published three solo albums to his credit. The first, the film’s soundtrack ‘Into the wild’is dated 2007, the other two “Ukulele songs” (read the review here) And “Earthling” (read the review here) from 2011 and 2022 respectively. Today Vedder turns 60 and what you can read below is our review of his debut album.

A boy from a good family graduates. He tells his family: don’t look for me for a while, I’m wandering around America. It seems like a common story, a liberating journey before starting real life. Instead the boy renames himself “Alex supertramp”, and after various wanderings he retires “Into the wild”, in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan forest. After surviving for months in the wild, he finally dies of starvation. But, the finds and his diary say, he died peacefully, because he sought his own path, he followed his vocation, outside the rules of society. It is the true story of Chris McCandless, told years ago by the writer Jon Krakauer in a book that has become “cult”.

Sean Penn decided to turn it into a film, convinced that this boy’s story is paradigmatic of the distortions of modern society. The Pearl Jam singer’s first solo album is the soundtrack to this film: 11 songs in which you seem to hear McCandless’s voice through Vedder’s. If you follow Pearl Jam you know how Vedder is able to touch the right emotional chords when he sings, and here he succeeds fully.

“Into the wild” is a record that, if detached from all this, may seem strange. It is not a traditional soundtrack – the instrumental inserts are reduced – but not even a record of real songs: every now and then they are short “bonsai-songs”, with a mostly relaxed atmosphere. Every now and then real songs, like “Hard Sun” (a cover by a Seattle musician called Gordon Peterson), which is a masterpiece. But everything makes sense in here, and nothing sounds unfinished, indeed every song seems perfect in the form it has.

Perhaps this album could be seen as yet another release linked to Pearl Jam, but in reality it is something different. Something done with care, perhaps small, but in its own way it is a little magic.