Pearl Jam recently brought their Dark Matter world tour to Seattle this week. May 30, the band frontman Eddie Vedder played an emotional acoustic version of Nine Inch Nails classic ‘Hurt’ and dedicated to friends the group have lost in their hometown.
Pearl Jam covers Nine Inch Nails song
In a 17-song set and a remarkable eight-track encore, the band showed love for its home city, fans everywhere, and fallen friends, for whom Eddie Vedder delivered a debut treatment of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt.”
Vedder had kicked off the encore portion of the concert with a solo, emotional, cover of the Nine Inch Nails’ 1994 classic “Hurt.” Ahead of tackling the track, Vedder got a bit nostalgic and reflected on all of those from the Seattle music scene we have lost – like Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, and Screaming Trees’ Mark Lanegan, to name a few.
“In any other city, there’s no other guest list as big as the one that we have when we’re in Seattle. San Diego? Chicago? Nope. Seattle,” Vedder said. “And, to be honest, I wish it were longer. There are certain names that I so deeply wish were on the guest list tonight, but we lost them too early and in ways that we could never imagine. Damn it, if I can’t stop thinking about it, but that’s a good thing too, I guess.”
While Vedder has previously covered “Hurt” several times in the past, this was the first time he has done so at a Pearl Jam concert.
To kick off its set, Pearl Jam let loose the 1991 fan favorite “Black” and tacked on its traditional “We Belong Together” tag, then followed up on this explosive entry with the Vitalogy classic “Immortality” and Ten’s “Why Go.”
After performing through some recent entries from Dark Matter, including the standout single “Wreckage,” dropping live staples like “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town,” “Jeremy” and “Corduroy.”
Among the most exciting moments of the main portion of the performance were the relative rarities interspersed throughout, including 2006’s “Come Back” and 1996’s “In My Tree,” as well as tour debuts of 1998’s “Pilate” and 2002’s “Love Boat Captain.”
Pearl Jam are set to hit the road again on June 22 with a show at Dublin, Ireland’s Marlay Par and open a nine-stop European tour that will keep the band on the road through July 13. After that, the group will return to the U.S., doing shows at high-profile stages in August and September. For more information on the Dark Matter World Tour, visit pearljam.com/tour.
