Album of the Day — January 18
Eddie Vedder — Into the Wild Soundtrack — 2007
Eddie Vedder — Into the Wild Soundtrack — 2007
18.January.2021
Eddie Vedder
Into the Wild Soundtrack
2007
I was re-watching director Sean Penn’s film, Into the Wild, the other night. Based on Jon Krakauer’s book of the same name, the film focuses on American wanderer Christopher McCandless (Alexander Supertramp). It’s as flawless as any film can be, and as it always does, it gutted me.
However, this time I paid more attention to the selection and use of Eddie Vedder’s (lead singer of Pearl Jam) songs throughout the film.
It’s the rare soundtrack that can both augment a movie in addition to holding its own. This is especially true if the movie is loaded with rock music or rock artists. But with Into the Wild, both Eddie Vedder and Sean Penn deserve much respect for pulling it all together.
By 2007, Eddie Vedder had emerged as seeming to have made peace with his rock star status.
As the lead singer of Pearl Jam, Vedder has made acoustic music before. However, on the Into the Wild soundtrack, it’s not just an Eddie Vedder solo project. It’s not just an acoustic project. This is Vedder standing naked before his audience. Nine of the eleven songs are written by him, he plays all the instruments, and only on two songs does he get help from outside players (Jerry Hannan and Corin Tucker).
The majority of the songs clock in at under three minutes and avoid typical song structure (verse, chorus, verse, bridge, verse, and/or chorus). In fact, the songs' lyrical structure on some can make them sound less like songs and more like meditations. The album's opener, “Setting Forth” at 1:37, is one:
Setting Forth
Be it no concern
Point of no return
Go forward in reverse
This I will recall
Every time I fall
Ahh-oohhh
Setting forth in the universe
Ahh-oohhh
Setting forth in the universe
Out here, realigned
A planet out of sight
Nature drunk and high
Ahh-oohhh
But Eddie Vedder IS a rock star. And no better example of the convergence of rock and the meditative nature of both the movie and the soundtrack is Into the Wild’s “Hard Sun” (written by Canadian singer/songwriter Gordon Peterson). Sung with a certain swagger, at first look, it sounds like a love song:
When I walk beside her, I am the better man
When I look to leave her
I always stagger back again
Once I built an ivory tower
So I could worship from above
When I climbed down to be set free
She took me in again
It’s the second verse that clues you in that Vedder is singing about Mother Nature:
When she comes to greet me
She is mercy at my feet
When I see her bitter charm
She throws it back at me
Once I dug an early grave
To find a better land
She just smiled and laughed at me
And took her blues back again
The last verse addresses the ecologic nightmare that has been escalating for years, as well as serving as a capstone for McCandless’s tragic journey.
Once I stood to lose her
When I saw what I had done
Bowed down and threw away the hours
Of her garden and her sun
So I tried to warn her
I turned to see her weep
Forty days and forty nights
And it’s still coming down on me
And then the song fades with the meditative:
Oh, there’s a big, a big hard sun
Beating on the big people
In the big hard world
However, it would be the acoustic and folk heavy “Guaranteed” that crushes it. The song is rich with Vedder’s piercing lyrics about middle-class materialism and loveless marriages — the very things Christoper McCandless sought to escape:
Guaranteed
On bended knee is no way to be free
Lifting up an empty cup I ask silently
That all my destinations will accept the one that’s me
So I can breath
Circles they grow and they swallow people whole
Half their lives they say goodnight to wives they’ll never know
Got a mind full of questions and a teacher in my soul
So it goes…
Don’t come closer or I’ll have to go
Holding me like gravity are places that pull
If ever there was someone to keep me at home
It would be you…
Everyone I come across in cages they bought
They think of me and my wandering
But I’m never what they thought
Got my indignation but I’m pure in all my thoughts
I’m alive…
Wind in my hair, I feel part of everywhere
Underneath my being is a road that disappeared
Late at night, I hear the trees
They’re singing with the dead
Overhead…
What makes the song so interesting is that it contains something new in both Vedder’s singing and songwriting — less anger and more reflection. It’s still just as incisive as “Alive” but much less angry.
It’s no wonder that “Guaranteed” would win Vedder the 2008 Golden Globe and secure a Grammy Nomination and World Soundtrack Nomination the same year.
Like almost all of Vedder’s output, both with Pearl Jam and without, critics were mixed.
The freedom and trust that Sean Penn gave Eddie Vedder to write the songs reaped huge rewards. In fact, watching the movie, you can see that Penn allowed his performers the same latitude. When you know the outcome of the story, to make a film containing the emotional depth the Penn does here requires a degree of trust in all the moving parts. To trust that everyone involved, at all levels, is bringing not just their “A” game, but “A” everything.
Sometimes you capture lightning in a bottle. And when you do, you get something as brilliant as Into the Wild. Sean Penn and company tell the tragic tale of Christopher McCandless (Alexander Supertramp) and layer it with humanity and empathy. Eddie Vedder’s beautiful soundtrack to Into the Wild is stringing that narrative together and helps elevate the film to the proper status of brilliance.