Anna Webber – Los Angeles Photographer

CD Review: Into the Wild by Eddie Vedder
Record Label: J Records
Release Date: September 18. 2007

Though we could have expected more from the almost-first solo album by Pearl Jam front man Eddie Vedder—more than a 33-minute Into the Wild movie soundtrack—the album does have a cohesiveness about it that may have only been met through divine intervention. Vedder is arguably the most recognized superstar of the grunge era, after Kurt Cobain, whose vocal style has become almost synonymous with the genre.

And he releases a motion picture soundtrack as his long-awaited solo attempt? Check it out.

An appraisal of a good soundtrack should consider how well it stands on its own without the movie. While the album sometimes lacks those certain defining characteristics that Vedder is glorified for, it does stand strong regardless if you see the movie. It stands strong even with a few wavering production decisions that consequently, causes it to fall a bit short of what listeners may have expected. Disappointing to some of Vedder’s really fervent fans, it does seem a bit overproduced in some areas like over-the-top instrumentation and commercial intent, as well as the disappointing lack in length.

All things considered, it is a major motion picture soundtrack, bound by major motion picture creative control. Which is why we could—and will—expect more of Vedder with his first real solo album that is hopefully in be the making.

Because a major motion picture was backing the project financially, there are major motion picture production guidelines, writers and unfamiliar accompanying musicians to deal with which may be frustrating and limiting for the artist.

But 33 minutes of mostly great music hammers 50 minutes of crap, which has become much too acceptable for many consumers these days.

“No Ceiling” is one of the best tracks on the album. It plucks banjos, acoustic guitar and mandolin, that lead you to “walk the hemisphere/ sure as I’m breathin’/sure as I’m sad.”  Wandering around unnamed territory, it leads you to climb a mountain and, just as your eyes scan the expanse before you, the edge gives without warning. It ends, you wait, and nothing but the minute-long acoustic instrumental that follows ending the same way. Perhaps there’s wisdom in it to be found; the album photo for this song, Tuolumne, has an old Bronco driving on the train bound side of a railroad track along the Alaskan coast. They do what they want.

Vedder’s distinctively sexy tonality will be turning the ladies into sugar, no doubt. And the men? Expect to feel the same as you hear his deep cracking baritone that you’ve come to know so well with, if you’ve got any taste, your favorite high school grunge band.

Vedder wrote all but two songs, “Hard Sun” and “Society” which incidentally are the two most produced songs in that they lack the unchained Vedder quality that his listeners have come to know and trust. “Hard Sun” is supplemented by professional voices and has a very clear commercial appeal. Graced with the throbbing of echoing tribal drums and tribal voices, the song is sweating during a daring travel through African plains. It is hardly what one would imagine Vedder to record on his own. But knowing he did not write it, helps.

No song exceeds two and a half minutes, which consequentially torques up some serious disappointment among excited fans. Consider this a warning for Vedder aficionados; you’ll be swept off your feet into the tightly woven textures of some of these tracks, like the striking 12-string guitar on “Setting Forth”, the ethereal electric guitar on “Long Nights”. Expect to be left suspended from time to time, hurting even, because a great song will drop off, while it could really stand at least two or three more verses.

Lyrically contemplative, Vedder’s songs contain short, sound lyrics in response to dreams of freedom and wandering away from society’s consumption with everything and nothing, particularly in the song, “Society”. “I think I need to find a bigger place/ Cause when you have/ More than you think/ You need more space.” In “No Ceiling”, his journey responds to returning home with a promise: “to keep this wisdom in my flesh.” These songs don’t just sit on your skin, they saturate.

The last song on the album “Guaranteed” sounds like a bedtime lullaby for his baby girl, soft, whimsical and dreaming: “If ever there was someone to keep me at home/it would be you.” Explaining his rambling and his intentions, it’s “wind in my hair I feel part of everywhere.” He ends, “Leave it to me to find a way to be.” If you’re the emotional type, the song alone could nudge some tears, as it seems to have a common nostalgia about it for anyone who is or has known someone with a spirit so free, itching to breathe outside unfeeling city lights.

We could expect this to be an action packed movie without lengthy musical punches, full of watershed realizations and the grasping of one’s inner wisdom. With weeping electric guitar, bouts of piano keys and pump organ, a kick drum keeping time with a consistent and sure heart beat while solid bass lines hold the bottom down, this album really does leave us wanting more.

Because it’s so honest. Not a Pearl Jam rock anthem, though political and charming just the same. Bound with basic human insight, it penetrating race, creed, home, no matter. It is a departure from Vedder’s usual arena energy, which by no means denotes an end for Pearl Jam. In fact Vedder is the last of his band mates to record a solo album. Pearl Jam is however, on brief hiatus as two of his band mates care for their newborn daughters. In response to the circumstances Vedder has hit on an exciting possibility to the L.A. Times, he says he is “mulling the possibility of playing a few shows on his own, preferably at venues more intimate than the band’s usual arenas.”
anna webber

Reviewing Kurt Vonnegut’s final essays

Publisher: Seven Stories Press

September 15, 2005

By Anna Webber

Grandmaster of American Letters Kurt Vonnegut  (Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions) recently released A Man Without A Country, the closest thing the world’s ever come to getting a biography from Vonnegut. With the clear intention that this will be his last work, 82-year-old Vonnegut decides to write his thoughts down before he shuffles off, compiling them into what he sees to be a defunct manifesto to a world chock full of “PP’s” (Psychopathic Personalities), otherwise known as C-Students from Yale and Harvard, the professional guessers that loathe information and the Beatitudes (which is to him, Socialism). Putting aside futility for a moment, he says it all anyway. It’s his warison, a call to arms, a frivolous search for truth through the tender, and the absurd. “If I die—God forbid,” Vonnegut writes, “I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, ‘Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?’”

In this collection of short essays written over the period of five of the last six years of his life, he shanks the American democratic capitalist regime into bite-sized, digestible pieces as he reflects on its history, religion, gender, race, his own personal life, and what a bummer it is to be a human being. To this he says, “Life is no way to treat an animal.” He gives fatherly and grandfatherly wisdom, exposes age-old wounds stuffed with the wick of human tragedy over his 82 years, and douses them blatantly in political moonshine.

Each essay is propelled by a menacingly comedic undercurrent, though all with the purest of intentions. “I’m going to tell you some news. No, I am not running for President, although I do know sentence, if it is to be complete, must have both a subject and a verb.” Vonnegut manipulates his signature strain of black humor as he reflects on the many tragic situations of the world, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, the current War on Terror, et cetera. He skims the tragic situations brought on by America and false religious agendas that are hilariously, not religious at all. He writes that America today “might as well be Poland under occupation.” We got a Dick, a Colon, and a Bush calling the shots… he’ll point you in the right direction to the loo.

As he filets his way through the past, through the present, through his own grim perception of our time-clocked future, he leaves a few jagged chicken bones throughout to send splintering their way through our GI tracts after he swoons us, drenching us with savory wit, only to choke us like dogs. He gives us lessons in creative writing: “First rule, do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” He talks about when he was a little guy scampering around during the depression, making barbed events ripping comedy at the dinner table. Too young to be taken seriously, he got the reactions he craved with his adept, precise humor.
He makes sense of his classification as a “science fiction writer”, recalling that it’s a bunch of baloney, being dubbed as such for the sole reason that he was a Chemistry major at Cornell and wrote about Schenectady, New York in his first book Player Piano. In the novel he mentions a factory, in essence, technology that no one had ever heard of. “I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.”

Written simply, staunchly, and truthfully, his words flow off the page at a cadence you only encounter in conversation with an old granddad, making it an easy read. It’s shrouded in the same loving advice Vonnegut would give to his own children. This book is a sort of Q&A with Kurt, but the only one questioning and answering is Vonnegut himself, sometimes a cranky, crotchety old man, sometimes so simply wise, so authoritative, so absolutely trustworthy, he’ll so easily soften the hearts of his readers. And he’ll call you a “twerp” if you don’t go out today and purchase his suggested reading list.

At one point he tells us, “To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.” He emphasizes that the world sucks, that the dirt bags of our past fundamentally destroyed the path of humankind, but “no matter what era in human history, everybody just got here… all these games already going on that could make you crazy even if you weren’t crazy to begin with.” Get on with your day, he emphasizes. Create something. Be happy. “At least we’re still alive!”

Location: James Hickey Studio, Los Angeles, CA

Subject: Kelly Dalton

Photographer: Anna Webber