“Before my time”: The singer that put Eddie Vedder to sleep
Part of being a musician is being a sponge for every kind of music that comes your way. Even if some genres aren’t in line with what an artist plays, they can easily take bits and pieces from what they’ve listened to and channel them into making something completely different. Although Eddie Vedder was always a student of the heroes that came before him, he admitted that Perry Como affected him by lulling him right to bed.
Because listening back to Como’s music, you’d think that he came from a place where rock and roll had never been invented. There are pieces of his music that are still brilliantly sophisticated for their time, but there’s no Chuck Berry fan from around the same time who wanted to suddenly listen to the sounds of light jazz.
And especially by the 1990s, Como may as well have been considered music exclusively for grandparents. Whereas the last few years had been populated with bands that were too artificial, Pearl Jam could qualify for being the exact opposite of what Como was all about, usually involving Vedder shrieking his brains out about all of the internal trauma that he faced as a kid.
At the same time, Vedder could still clean it up when he wanted to. The same man who sang ‘Blood’ was never going to be considered easy listening by any stretch, but it’s near-impossible to believe that the same guy was capable of making songs like ‘Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town’ work so well with just an acoustic guitar and his heavy baritone to lead the way.
Then again, there’s not that much leg work that needs to be done to connect Vedder and Como’s styles. After all, Como came from the same trad-jazz style that made Frank Sinatra’s music work so well, and since Jim Morrison of the Doors saw Sinatra as an idol, it’s impossible not to see Vedder as the offspring of Morrison’s Sinatra fixations combined with the manic snarl of Iggy Pop or Henry Rollins.
When asked about what he thought of the old-school crooner, though, Vedder figured that he only needed him for sleep aid when asked about being influenced by him, saying, “Perry Como has influenced me in the past. He’s made me go to sleep. I have to admit, I’ve been accused of listening to, or being associated with older music, like The Who, but Perry Como’s, I think, a little bit before my time.”
That said, it’s not like Vedder always had to operate on ten every time he stepped up to sing a rock and roll song. Their version of the doo-wop standard ‘Last Kiss’ specifically works because of how downplayed the tune is, and when he works on his own like the acoustic ballad ‘Just Breathe’, he has that same kind of dramatic heft in his voice that any good crooner should have had in their prime.
But for as good as he can sound on those ballads, that’s not where Vedder’s heart is. As much as some people can ask him to go the way of the lounge singer, nothing could ever get in between him and the Roger Daltrey screams that he taught himself to do when he was a kid.
