Pearl Jam still has a lot to say. On April 19, the grunge pioneers dropped Dark Matter, their first studio release since 2020’s Gigaton. Of the album, Eddie Vedder has said, “No hyperbole — I think this is our best work.” (And that’s saying something.) Pearl Jam has never shied away from tackling social and political topics in their lyrics, and their latest drop is no exception. Vedder recently opened up about the meaning behind the track “Wreckage.”
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Eddie Vedder Says Donald Trump is “Desperate” and “Playing the Victim”
In a recent interview with the UK’s Sunday Times, the Pearl Jam frontman said former president Donald Trump inspired the album’s third single, “Wreckage.”
“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,” Eddie Vedder said. “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.”
[RELATED: 4 Songs You Didn’t Know Eddie Vedder Wrote Solo for Pearl Jam]
Vedder continued, “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.”
According to Variety, Vedder backtracked some during a Tuesday (April 23) interview with Howard Stern. The vocalist and guitarist said, “I don’t know if I’d attach that to the ex-president, but I guess it is about a difficult relationship.”
Vedder has long been a critic of the former president. He name-checks the billionaire in 2020’s “Quick Escape,” longing “to find a place Trump hadn’t f***ed up yet.” The Illinois native, 59, again calls out Trump in “Seven O’ Clock.” The track refers to him as “Sitting Bull*** as our sitting president.”
Pearl Jam “Didn’t Know How to Behave” in the Face of Fame
Pearl Jam’s rise to fame was head-spinning. The band’s second album, 1993’s Vs., sold nearly 1 million copies in its first five days on sale. Vedder and the rest of the band shrank away from the newfound success, refusing to produce music videos for any of the album’s singles.
“We didn’t know how to behave,” Eddie Vedder told The Times. “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.”
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