Music For An Idiot

Chicago Bears won. Good.
New York Mets suck, losing their 8th in a row to Philadelphia.
They don't deserve to play in the post-season. They're still in first place but playing so despicably this late in the year is a total downer. Ahh well.

In between football, football, and more football, and some Yankees-Red Sox, this album I'm about to play for the 4th time today. It's getting attention all over the place. I guess that just goes to show how popular Eddie Vedder's become. I can remember when he was just the lead singer of some kick-ass band named Pearl Jam who had just put out their first album and weren't even widely well known. Also, this book's been immensely popular and now the film's coming soon which is gonna be talked about a lot as well. I've been trying to separate the music from the film's main character, the cult-like hero Christopher McCandless a.k.a. Alexander Supertramp who had many great notions about the disgusting materialism of American society and giving away $24,000 to Oxfam was a beautiful thing to do... but when it came to Alaska he was nothing less than 100% pure idiot moron fool schmuck. He wanted to walk from the middle of the territory a few hundred miles to the Pacific Ocean on the western side of the state. Yeah, HAA!! You'd face 500 bears, 12 serious rivers, 2,000 creeks and streams many strong enough to carry you away, a fleet of mosquitos large enough to haul away Rhode Island, and soft mushy tundra that'll make your journey so slow that you might, might accomplish a mile an hour, maybe two if you're lucky. Add on top of that the immensely cold weather at night and during the day later into the season, and it's essentially an impossible task. But moron McCandless Supertramp had no idea... did he become permanantly brain damaged.... alright, enough, this post was supposed to just be about the music so....

Eddie Vedder

Into The Wild

music for the motion picture

2007

Setting Forth
No Ceiling
Far Behind
Rise
Long Nights
Tuolomne
Hard Sun
The Wolf
End Of The Road
Society
Guaranteed
Guaranteed [lyric-less, hidden track]

At only like 33 minutes for 11 songs, there isn't much music here. Many of the tunes are just short little ditties, sometimes even feeling like a song condensed. But what is here from Vedder is some pretty cool stuff. Largely acoustic, these aren't seriously rockin' Pearl Jam tunes. They are all sung with great passion and the lyrics can attest that this isn't some quicky little soundtrack job. It really makes me wonder how much time Sean Penn, director of Into The Wild, spent with Eddie to be able to really convey what he wanted from these songs. Whether it was days and numerous screenings of the film, or an hour, Vedder seemingly catches the mood of Into The Wild and of the film's main character, Christopher McCandless, perfectly... and the movie's not even out yet but that feeling is easy to have if you know the story of idiot McCandless. Uh oh, here I go again, I didn't wanna venture into writing about him, as this is about these tunes. I will digress and say that Hard Sun has gotta be hands down my favorite tune. This ones runs twice as long as most of what's on this album and has a fuller sound than all the rest. I could easily see PJ jammin' this one off live and if they don't add it to their rotation of songs I'll be surprised. Society is also a pleaser to me personally... "less is more" it goes, which is true. Vedder does a great job of speaking for McCandless -- "Society, you're a crazy breed. I hope you're not lonely without me. Society, crazy indeed. I hope you're not lonely without me." As a songwriter he has achieved near poetry capturing the spirit of Thoreau and Alexander Supertramp wrapped up in one. It'll be interesting to see where all of tunes appear in the movie. Probably the film won't even be able to capture the true McCandless and the songs, in the end, will really be a better companion piece to the book rather than as a soundtrack to the film.

Grab it from: - All Tribes