Eddie Vedder released a new song today. This is the cover of Save It For Later of the Beat, the English band known in the United States as English Beat. Vedder’s version is featured on the third season soundtrack of The Bear and, very unusually for him and Pearl Jam, it contains a saxophone solo like in the original (the name of the musician who plays it is not yet known).
Pearl Jam fans know Save It For Later. The group has often mentioned it live as tags inside Better Man due to the similarity of the harmonic progression of the two songs. Written by a very young Vedder for his band, Bad Radio, and recorded with the group for the second album Vs. but discarded because it was potentially a hit (yes, at the time the singer thought like that), Better Man it was then recovered Vitalogy and actually contains more than one assonance with Save It For Later. This version also sounds like a, so to speak, acknowledgment of paternity.
Curiously, too Save It For Later had a troubled history and was composed by future band guitarist Dave Wakeling as a boy, but put aside for a long time and only recovered for the third album in 1982 Special Beat Service.
“I wrote it as a teenager, before I joined the Beat,” Wakeling said. «The topic is the transition from adolescence to your twenties, when you realize that your idea of how easy life is doesn’t correspond to reality. He therefore talks about feeling lost, of not knowing what his place is in the world, of trying to find it. The hook, “save it for later”, is a dirty line, I thought it was hilarious to put it in a song: “save it – comma – for later FELLATOR”».
«I thought it would be funny to put it in a song that everyone would sing, but I didn’t imagine that the joke would last 30 years. And so, you couldn’t find your place in the world and everyone gave you advice without giving the impression they knew more than you. So the piece said to keep the advice to yourself, save it for later.”
The song was sung live in the mid-1980s by one of Vedder’s idols, Pete Townshend. It is possible that Vedder heard it for the first time in 1986, on the Who leader’s live album Deep End Live!Wakeling says: “I get a phone call at 11 in the morning, someone hands me the phone and says, ‘It’s Pete Townshend to you.’ And I think it’s a joke and I say, ‘Yeah, he calls every Saturday at this time, right?’ I say sarcastically, ‘Hey, hey Pete.’ And he says, ‘Hey, hey Dave, it’s Peter Townshend and I’m here with David Gilmour and we’re trying to figure out the tuning of Save It For Later”».
Eddie Vedder’s version:
The Beat’s original:
Pete Townshend’s version of Wakeling:
