Eddie Vedder discussed Pearl Jam contemplating their sequel to Ten after the album’s success in a new Letter To You Radio on Apple Music Hits interview with Bruce Springsteen. Eddie Vedder announced a new project with Dave Grohl yesterday. Alternative Nation transcribed their comments.
Bruce: Well, I decided that to grow, you have to be able to withstand the anxiety of growth. Growth always brings with it, tremendous internal conflict and anxiety. It’s just, that’s the way it works. And so I decided, and just barely sometimes, that my ability and the ability of my band and the kind of band that we were, which was inclusive. Our arms were wide open to whoever was interested in what we were interested in. Led me down a certain path towards, I suppose, more of a mainstream, if that’s what you want to call it, work life. And I had a couple of big run-ins with it. One was obviously, Born to Run and then the other one was, Born in the USA where the thing quadrupled.
It was like, “Okay, that was big enough.” And then, wham, then a wave of a size you can’t even imagine hits you. But by that time I was 34 and I had been through it once before and I was much more able to handle it, even though it was challenging. But also we didn’t come out of a scene with a lot of peers. We were a one-shot out of Asbury Park. There was maybe another band, the Southside Johnny, but really those were the groups out of the shore. We didn’t come out of a intensely big scene, which it seemed like you came out of more of where there were more bands and there was more of a real local scene, and you had to deal with the opinions of a lot of your peers. I mean, basically, I was anxious.
The band thought it was the greatest thing in the world that we were having success and all. And I dealt with the anxiety, and at the end of the day, I can always remember, there was a moment where I could decide whether I… At the time I was going to be on the cover of these two magazines Time and Newsweek, which to our listeners out there were magazines. And believe it or not, they were magazines at a time when a lot of people read magazines. And they were the types of magazines that did not have popular entertainers on their covers. And so I had the ability to decide whether I was going to do these interviews or not to be on these covers
And when it came down to it, I took the shot. I took the shot because I didn’t want to be on my porch 30 years later going, “Oh man, I should’ve… Yeah. If I’d only done that, this would have happened.” I didn’t want to be one of those guys. I want to be one of the guys who said, “Well, hey, I may have a regret here or there, or maybe I don’t, but I took it as far as the limits of my talents and my abilities and my dreams and my desires and my hopes and my fears allowed me to take it.”
And I don’t have any regrets about doing that. And one of the bottom line was you had the kind of band that simply was a big, powerful band with a reach that wanted to extend to a sizeable audience. I mean, it was just in the nature of your music. I don’t know if you feel like that or not, but that’s how it looked from my vantage point from the outside.
Eddie: We were not that secure in our …Yeah. I thought if people like this record or this batch of songs, because really, there was a lot of attention just from the first one and we hadn’t even made the second one yet. I just wanted to make the next record and have the next record be better. I was like, “If you like this, then I think we got even more that we can better that one.” Yeah. I just wanted to make more records.
