Review: Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam hit another gear in Seattle Night 2

Concert review

There are moments when artists completely give in to the song. Like some combination of muscle memory and meditation, the mind is free to dance with the internal flame that drives them to become artists in the first place, trusting that the body will know what to.

Sounds corny, but the best performances often come from this place.

On what he deemed “a historic day,” Eddie Vedder spent much of Thursday’s tour-capping homecoming show operating from this plane — his internal flame lit up like a bonfire for the sold-out Climate Pledge Arena crowd to warm in the glow.

The lord of vibrato’s melismatic flourishes flickered like comet trails across an anthemic “Jeremy,” one of the darkest hits in modern rock history, which blew up in a joyful supernova on Thursday. With seemingly unconscious precision, Vedder landed surprise uppercuts, his voice surging on unexpected syllables, before rumbling through a rough-and-tumble bridge toward the end.

As was the case with Pearl Jam’s 2018 Home Shows and, to a lesser extent, Vedder’s solo shows at Benaroya Hall in 2022 and 2023, the frontman seemed looser and fierier on the second of Pearl Jam’s two Seattle shows, whether it was the extra night in his own bed, the red wine going down a little smoother or the jolt of Thursday’s headlines.

At any rate, Night 2 Eddie and the band, rounded out live by longtime touring mate Boom Gaspar on keys and ace utility player Josh Klinghoffer, threw extra heat on songs like “Waiting for Stevie” before Vedder made an impassioned speech about political division on the day Donald Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a felony.

“I was thinking about this the other night, to look around and to see you all and to see this crowd, our town, our neighborhood, our city,” Vedder said. “We pass each other in our cars, bringing our kids to school, going to the grocery store. We’re in the car next to you. … These kind of nights our commonality is music, but every day our commonality is life. … To have the ability and the microphone to communicate, it’s not a gift it’s a responsibility, and we would like to use it to say, damn it, we’re being divided. And we should not be. We should not be. With all this chaos, we need to come together amongst all the chaos. It’s insidious. We can’t let it happen and we should refuse to be used by a desperate politician — any politician.”

While his words were chosen to not directly draw political lines, they drew even louder applause in reliably lefty Seattle than the standing ovation local indie rockers Deep Sea Diver received earlier with another sublime opening set. Whatever Pearl Jam’s crew did under that historic roof this week to deliver the best-sounding shows in the arena’s young history, leave a note in the dressing room for the out-of-towners, eh?

Known for their shake ‘em up set lists, Pearl Jam once again anchored the show around “Dark Matter” material, with the new stuff comprising a little more than a third of the roughly two-and-a-half-hour set. (“Alive” was the only repeated classic from Tuesday.)

The most stunning surprise came after a short set break when Vedder returned to cover Johnny Cash’s acoustic take on Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt.” The man in black’s subtle “I wear this crown of thorns” lyric tweak felt like a serendipitous nod to the late Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone, the Pearl Jam antecedent whose best-known song was “Crown of Thorns.”

“You can guess that … in any other city, there’s no other guest list as big as the one when we’re in Seattle,” Vedder said introducing the arresting number. “San Diego, Chicago, nope. Seattle. 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 ‘em too early and in ways that we could have never imagined — and damn it if I can’t stop thinking about ‘em. But that’s a good thing, too.”

Seated alone in the spotlight, Vedder’s voice ached with a half-growl half-whisper, singing to a city that feels the same. His bandmates subtly rejoining him for a chilling “Inside Job,” the crowd erupted as the camera flashed the back of drummer Matt Cameron’s shirt, which bore the visage of his fallen Soundgarden mate Chris Cornell. It was the weepiest stretch of Pearl Jam’s otherwise celebratory debut at Climate Pledge Arena, which could be the start of something special.

The idea of Pearl Jam doing an extended residency at the sparkling hockey pyramid was out there even before developers the Oak View Group — whose allegedly cozy relationship with Live Nation-Ticketmaster drew some federal heat in the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against the live entertainment power last week — won the contract. OVG CEO Tim Leiweke may have put the cart before the horse when publicly discussing the prospects during the bidding process. But as he seemed to on Tuesday, Vedder at least flirted with the idea on stage.

“I’m just taking a second because, goddammit, we might not play in Seattle again for a while, but I’m gonna have a drink and enjoy it,” he said, grabbing some vino before thanking Tim and Tod Leiweke and other Kraken and Climate Pledge Arena brass. “They did say that we can play any time we want and they’ve made it pretty nice for us, so this could be something maybe we do more often. Tuesdays at Climate Pledge or something like that, Thursdays.”

We’ll work on the name, Ed, but fans clearly liked where your head’s at.

Who knows if anything will ever materialize from the words of a guy running on red wine and adrenaline, soaking in that hometown embrace for two-and-half-hours. But considering the band’s legion of travel-happy fans and the fact that we’re living in the age of Swifties flying overseas to see their queen, if this former C+ economics student was running Seattle’s tourism bureau, I’m at least making some calls next week.