Back in July 2011, Eddie Vedder took a seat upstairs in the lounge at Pearl Jam HQ, on the outskirts of Seattle, blew out his cheeks and relayed how he’d narrowly missed getting involved in a multi-vehicle car crash on his way here. “It’s a highway, a ramp so you’re going pretty fast, I turned the corner and it was dead-stopped,” the Pearl Jam frontman explained. “I went sideways, the guy behind me went sideways. It was an accident that had just happened within minutes of another worse one in front of me, that’s why everyone had stopped. It makes you think about life, between that and the Amy Winehouse thing…”
“The Amy Winehouse thing” wasn’t just on Vedder’s mind – it was on everyone’s. Just a few days earlier, the Back To Black singer had been found dead at her home in Camden, north London, a remarkable, game-changing talent gone way too young. I was in Seattle to interview Vedder about the film Cameron Crowe had made about his band, Pearl Jam 20, but first he wanted to discuss Winehouse’s death and what needed to change in the music industry to prevent something similar happening again.
