Lenten Listen #40: Eddie Vedder - Into the Wild

I’ve continued my Lenten discipline of listening to at least one full album per day for the past 12 days, even though I’ve gotten a little lazy when it comes to recording them on the blog. Oh well. Since this is Holy Week, I figured I should jump back on the wagon again.

There are few vocalists that move me to the extent that Eddie Vedder, the voice of our generation, does. This work, composed for the excellent movie version of Jon Krakauer’s incredible book chronicling the Thoreauan journey of young idealist, Christopher McCandless, is one that strikes a particularly deep chord with me, as I toil away in the cubicle wasteland, yearning for the sun and the open sky, the green grass and the Edenic paradise of even a small garden plot. Someday I hope to escape the stifling confines of corporate America, but until then I’ll live vicariously through the music of Eddie Vedder.

“Guaranteed” is my favorite song from the album and probably one of my favorite songs of all time.

On bended knee is no way to be free
Lifting up an empty cup I ask silently
That all my destinations will accept the one that’s me
So I can breathe

Circles they grow and they swallow people whole
Half their lives they say goodnight to wives they’ll never know
Got a mind full of questions and a teacher in my soul
So it goes.

Don’t come closer or I’ll have to go
Holding me like gravity are places that pull
If ever there was someone to keep me at home
It would be you.

Everyone I come across in cages they bought
They think of me and my wandering
But I’m never what they thought
Got my indignation but I’m pure in all my thoughts
I’m alive

Wind in my hair, I feel part of everywhere
Underneath my being is a road that disappeared
Late at night I hear the trees
They’re singing with the dead
Overhead.

Leave it to me as I find a way to be
Consider me a satellite forever orbiting
I knew all the rules but the rules did not know me
Guaranteed.

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