A few details about the Into the Wild soundtrack.

http://billboard.blogs.com/jadedinsider ... bunch.html

The first single, "Hard Sun"' a song originally written by Seattle musician Gordon Peterson (aka Indio), is a duet Vedder did with Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney. A link to buy the disc on Amazon is already up.

http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2007/08 ... r-art.html

Interview with Sean Penn in Esquire Magazine:

http://www.esquire.com/features/seanpenn0907

A couple of specific references to the Into the Wild score:

Penn wrote it big, shot it epic -- spacious skies, fruited plains and amber waves of grain, and, in all her fearsome majesty, Alaska -- got Eddie Vedder to cough up an open-road opera, and gave Vince Vaughn a few precious minutes to hot-wire the whole operation, in return for which Vince gave Sean something missing from his prior movies: fun.

and

Early on, here is Hirsch hunkered on the sun-dazzled roadside, munching an apple, goofing.
"You're really good," he tells the fruit, his voice throaty with lust and rising in beatific wonder. "You're like a hundred, a thousand times better than any apple I've ever had. You're a super apple. You're so tasty. You're so organic. So natural. You're the apple of my eye."
Then, with the camera already tight on him, he crooks his starry-eyed mug right into the lens, grinning madly. And as Eddie Vedder's jet-engine roar torques into a "gonna rise up" lyric, well, good gosh, you'd have to be a golem not to feel goosebumps and some kind of love. Which means you'll likely sniffle come the end.

http://media.video.ign.com/ev/sv.html?dlURL=moviesmovies.ign.com/movies/video/article/798/798314/into_the_wild_062007_flvlowwide.flv&object_ID=944934

The September Issue of Outside Magazine has an article about the making of Into the Wild written by Christopher Keyes. There is a podcast of an interview with Christopher Keyes on their website.

http://outside.away.com/outside/toc/200709.html

Believe it or not, I'm actually working.

A side panel from Christopher Keyes Outside Magazine article:

Behind the Music
Pearl Jam fans will notice the distinct voice of Eddie Vedder on the Into the Wild soundtrack. The frontman recorded several original songs for the movie. "Eddie is someone I have in mind for music every day," says Penn. "I didn't even talk to him about it until I was back and done with the movie. He was not familiar with the book. But two days later he was reading it, and he called me up and said, 'I got to do this.'"

I don't know what to make of this giftcard business, but I did get a copy of the September issue of Spin Magazine.

Into the Wild is reviewed and their reviewer, Troy Patterson, gives it a rave. They didn't review Eddie's album, but instead gave their impressions of the music as it fits into the context of the film.

Into the Wild
Spotlight on the Music
His baritone full and tender, his instrumentation featuring both vengeful drums and bliss-out banjos, Eddie Vedder gives Into the Wild a sound to match its hero's spirit. The Pearl Jam singer contributed 12 tracks to the movie, and if anything links them, it's an attempt to find religion. His voice appears first as a hum, intimate and meditative, and then explodes in a mountaintop wail like a tribal call to prayer. The most memorable of the lyrics testifies to the ecstasy of self discovery: 'This love has got no ceiling.

NEWSFLASH!!!

New songs streaming, The Wolf and Tuolumne

http://www.intothewild.com/itw_main_mus ... alone.html

Taken from the Into The Wild movie notes:


The final element that weaves through the entire film is the music, which was on Penn’s mind from the very beginning, with many cues and specific songs written directly into the script. Ultimately, the score would combine original songs and music from Eddie Vedder along with the guitar compositions of Michael Brook and Kaki King.

“More and more as we were shooting I started to hear the voice of Eddie Vedder as the soul of Chris McCandless” says Penn. “Meanwhile, as Jay Cassidy and I were putting together assemblies each night to music, I found myself over and over going to the well of Michael Brook’s music and that began to feel sonically like the right approach. Then, Kaki King was recommended by Martin Hernandez, our sound designer, and I listened to some of her stuff and she came on board. And then, after all that, I asked Eddie if he would read the book and he did and he jumped right in writing songs, but he also went beyond that, writing instrumental pieces as well. Finally, we did some recording sessions up in Seattle with Michael and Eddie and Charlie Musslewhite and, between all of them, they just knocked it out of the park.”

Vedder who became friends with Penn years ago while writing music for Dead Man Walking, recalls Penn calling him up and asking him to come see the just-completed movie. “I thought it was great and there didn’t seem to be anything missing. It already had lots of good music,” he says. “But Sean said “just go with it and see what happens.” So we spent three days in the studio and I sent him about a half hour’s worth of music. Then, he said, “if I could get some more of this stuff you could become the interior voice of the character.” He saw the music as becoming almost what’s inside the kid’s head.”

He didn’t hesitate to dive in at Sean’s urging, knowing it would take him to unexpected places. “Sean is an incredibly special person,” Vedder remarks, “and let’s say you’re standing on the edge of a pool wondering if you should jump in, Sean’s the perfect person to push you.”

Having never read the book, Vedder remedied that and found ample inspiration in Chris McCandless. “ It wasn’t hard for me to understand this kid,” he admits. “I still feel so connected and have such strong memories of being at that age where you see the bullshit in the world and want to know how to address it, how can you maintain some idealism, and how to not become the same authority fiqures that you’re growing up around. This was an opportunity to kind of revisit that stuff. I think it takes real guts to do what Chris did and even if there was recklessness involved, it’s the kind of reckless we miss later when we’re settled in and wonder what we could have done with our lives.”

Vedder explains that while he was writing his own younger brother, also named Chris, went off to South Africa to meditate, and momentarily lost contact with the family. “ No one had heard from him for about 2 months and suddenly I felt like Carine, he says. “There were things happening in real life that were really parallel to the story.”

The songs themselves emerged in a rough, spontaneous style, meshing with the road-trip spirit of the film. Vedder likens the sound to demos Pete Townsend of The Who recorded, playing all the instruments himself. “ It was a different character than a band playing it – it’s simpler, but it’s also purer,” he says. He notes that he found himself constantly swapping instruments as he composed. :There’s a mandolin piece,” he points out, “ and I think this was only the second time I’ve played the mandolin, but it really just fit the emotion.”

Used to a more open-ended writing style, Vedder also found himself enjoying the relative constrictions of writing songs to scenes. “ This was really different for me because it’s so streamlined, “ he noted. “ You had a lot of parameters to work with- you know, this song has to be two minutes long and it’s at this point in his journey and there has to be instrumental music half-way through because the voice-over comes in. But, ultimately, it really came down to serving Sean and serving Chris McCandless, whom I felt a real responsibility to as well.”

Things came together so perfectly for Vedder, he began to wonder at the source of it. “ There was something in the air, you couldn’t deny something was going on,” he says. “The writing was so easy and the music came together in strange ways where beats would land on a shutting car door or the pump organ would mesh with the way Emile’s shoulders were going up and down. It was almost as if someone was helping from a non-tangible dimension. There was some really strange and quite beautiful elements that helped us along.”

The music- raw, intimate and emotional- further underscores the rich legacy of hard questions and intriguing propositions Chris McCandless left behind when he passed from this world. This is also a reflected in a line that Penn wrote at the end of his screenplay for Into The Wild. It reads: “Chris died alive.” When asked to elucidate on this, Penn sums it all up concisely: “Having lived, he still lives in us.”

The video:
http://video.music.yahoo.com/up/music/m ... cvideos%2F

There's no Ed in it but is a new version of the song.

is this that book about a kid who goes and lives in the alaska wilderness (I don't want to give away the ending). There is a chapter from it in the expository writing reader that Rutgers uses and it seems like a cool story

Am I reading this correctly? A whole album of stuff? That couldn't be a good idea.

He'll also have a small role in the film

why not?

I don't know, it just seems to be a strange way to drop a solo album.

Exactly... more stuff!!!!

Nothing wrong with a solo album between PJ album... everyone has their side projects.... seems like a good time, esp with other band members and new family additions...

Anyway.... fuckin great news...

Sept 18th!