Following the release of Pearl Jam‘s new album “Dark Matter,” frontman Eddie Vedder has revealed the rationale behind political song “Wreckage.”
Speaking to the U.K.’s Sunday Times, Vedder said of the song: “There is a guy in the United States who is still saying he didn’t lose an election, and people are reverberating and amplifying that message as if it is true. Trump is desperate. I don’t think there has ever been a candidate more desperate to win, just to keep himself out of prison and to avoid bankruptcy. It is all on the line, and he’s out there playing the victim — at least they’re doing this to me, because if not they would be doing it to you — but you haven’t falsified your tax records. You don’t have classified information in your basement. So the song is saying, let’s not be driven apart by one person, especially not a person without any worthy causes.”
When asked if Trump’s time is passing, Vedder said, “I can’t wait. Most thoughtful people are going through a bit of PTSD about it now.”
About the band’s meteoric rise to fame, especially when their second album “Vs” set sales records in 1993, Vedder said, “We didn’t know how to behave. We didn’t know how to deal with what we were going through. It certainly wasn’t anything we were able to celebrate. It was kind of terrifying, actually.”
The band also had a battle with Ticketmaster on the grounds that they were monopolizing concert ticketing resulting in a lull in live gigs for them. They resumed touring when Neil Young took them as his backing band for the 1995 “Mirror Ball” album.
“To see someone who was on the other side of it all, who was carrying on regardless, made us realize that none of the stuff we were going through really mattered,” Vedder told the Sunday Times. “Neil is mercurial, he moves fast, and more than anyone else I’ve encountered he is always in contact with his muse. I wish we could have dealt with our success more gracefully, but at the same time our reaction was authentic and watching Neil in action helped us see the value in that.”
“Dark Matter” is available to stream now.