While in the middle of their cover-heavy South American tour, which is chock-full of bows to John Lennon, The Beatles and Pink Floyd, Pearl Jam added a nod to Eagles of Death Metal to their cover repertoire. On the one-week anniversary of the devastating Paris attacks, Eddie Vedder and company took on a performance of "I Want You So Hard (Boy's Bad News)."
"We've never played this," Eddie Vedder explained to Brazil's Belo Horizonte crowd before jumping into a first-time cover of 2006's Death By Sexy track. Eagles of Death Metal were in the middle of a gig at Paris' Bataclan venue when the terror attack struck, leaving the members of the band in good health while their merchandise manager, Nick Alexander, died in the attack along with three members of their record label.
"While the band is now home safe, we are horrified and still trying to come to terms with what happened in France. Our thoughts and hearts are first and foremost with our brother Nick Alexander, our record company comrades Thomas Ayad, Marie Mosser, and Manu Perez, and all the friends and fans whose lives were taken in Paris, as well as their friends, families, and loved ones," the California group said of the attacks in a statement according to Entertainment Weekly.
The Seattle rockers have multiple ties with Eagles of Death Metal and its band members including Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme, who boasted a performance at Pearl Jam's PJ20 anniversary festivities, Rolling Stone notes. Furthermore, Queens of the Stone Age collaborator Alan Johannes joined forces with Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron to create Ten Commandos and back in 2012, Homme was featured on Pearl Jam's Christmas single, "In the Moonlight."
Belo Horizonte: ✔️ #PJLatinAmerica2015 @EODMofficial pic.twitter.com/UEvDwLLQ9L
— Pearl Jam (@PearlJam) November 21, 2015
Spanning the entire Brazil concert, Vedder addressed the crowd in Portuguese and at one point even referenced the recent dam disaster in Bento Rodrigues that resulted in the flooding of an entire village, killing six people and contaminating the wide-spread water supply for millions of inhabitants.
Along with the EODM cover, Pearl Jam took on John Lennon's Utopian classic "Imagine," The Beatles' "Rain" and another new cover of psychedelic rock giants Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb."
