It’s not every day you get to bear witness to three rock legends shooting the shit, but that’s exactly what went down when Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder joined Bruce Springsteen on his new radio show.
As part of Apple Music’s Letter to You Radio (via Consequence of Sound), the iconic frontmen joined host Springsteen to chat about their respective careers.
The conversation jumped between topics including dealing with fame, developing as a musician, and the comradery among bands.
Early on, Grohl revealed it was The Beatles that first inspired him to pursue music.
“Well, probably just like you, I would imagine, you start playing music when you’re young, because something catches your heart, right?” Grohl said in response to Springsteen.
He continued: “For me personally, it was the Beatles. And I never imagined that I could be a Beatle. I never imagined that I could be one of the rockstars that I had in my record collection, or on posters on my wall. I just thought, to me, it was this puzzle. There was something about the puzzle of harmony, and composition, and arrangement… and that’s when I was like, eight or nine years old.”
Grohl continued to touch on his formative years by explaining an epiphany he had during a Chicago rock show.
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“I saw this Chicago punk rock band, and then, I had that Ramones moment, where a lot of people saw the Ramones, and they were like, ‘Oh my God, it’s three chords, man. And the songs are two and a half minutes long.’ It’s like, this is not ELO. This is not Genesis.”
Meanwhile, Springsteen spoke to Vedder about the inevitability of Pearl Jam’s success, commenting that it was “just in the nature” of the band’s music to reach a large audience.
“You had the kind of band that simply was a big, powerful band with a reach that wanted to extend to a sizeable audience. I mean, it was just in the nature of your music. I don’t know if you feel like that or not, but that’s how it looked from my vantage point from the outside,” Springsteen said.
In response, Vedder revealed the band were “not that secure” themselves.
“We were not that secure in our… Really, there was a lot of attention just from the first [record] and we hadn’t even made the second one yet,” he said,
“I just wanted to make the next record and have the next record be better. I was like, ‘If you like this, then I think we got even more that we can better that one.’ Yeah. I just wanted to make more records.”
Letter to You Radio was conceived in conjunction with Springsteen’s upcoming album, Letter to You, which drops this Friday, October 23rd.
The full A Letter To You Radio episode featuring Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder can be heard on Apple Music here.
Check out ‘Letter to You’ by Bruce Springsteen:
