Eddie Vedder opens up about coping with grief and hardship on episode six of Lily Cornell Silver's mental health series, Mind Wide Open.
Following on from Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan's insightful interview on Mind Wide Open recently, Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder now features as the sixth guest on Lily Cornell Silver's important mental health series.
In this brand-new interview with Chris Cornell's daughter, Eddie opens up about the unsettling times we're experiencing right now (both politically and regarding coronavirus) and how he's coping, going on to detail how grief and hardship comes in waves throughout our lives – something he has experienced firsthand.
One particularly emotionally gruelling period of the Pearl Jam vocalist's life came in 2000, when nine fans were killed in a crush during the band's set at Roskilde Festival. Eddie remembers how this most testing of times occurred just under an hour after he found out that Lily had been born.
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“It’s interesting, Roskilde, where there was issues with weather and the crowd, and a horrific situation where lives were lost in front of the barricade… it’s crazy to talk to you about it, because right before we went onstage… we got the news that our great friends Chris and Susan had just had a child,” Eddie said (via Consequence Of Sound). “And her name was Lily, and we kinda cried some tears of joy… This was I think less than 15 minutes before we were gonna go on. And then we went out with you on our minds, and we were feeling empowered and emotional… and 40 minutes into the show, these terrible events happened.”
Eddie then revealed that The Who's Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey provided a source of comfort and guidance to him as he was coming to terms with what had happened, having been through a similarly tragic experience themselves in 1979.
“There I was in a fetal position, basically, and Pete said, ‘You can handle this,’ and I said, ‘I can’t. I don’t know, Pete, I don’t think I can. I’m losing it,’” Eddie continued. “And he said, ‘No, you can handle this…’ He empowered me to get my shit together.”
Speaking to Kerrang! about Roskilde in 2009, the frontman lamented: “It was the worst thing we’ve ever experienced, hopefully it will remain so. I was having a really hard time with, ‘Why us?’ We tried to take care of people, to protect people, to feel responsible for the crowd at all times with ticket prices and their safety. We just had to get through it, somehow. As you do with anything. As you do with death, or any of the negative things that happen to human beings. And we had to keep the music intact.”
Watch Eddie's full interview with Lily below:
