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A LETTER FROM VEDDER

When the guy from Pearl Jam found out that Vice was releasing the new Pierced Arrows album (because we told him) he insisted on writing a blurb for the press materials (because we asked him). Yesterday morning that blurb arrived in the form of a handwritten note from Eddie Vedder.

Like transcendentalist icon Henry David Thoreau, Vedder does not subscribe to our culture's pervasive sense of technological determinism and so abstains from such depersonalizing contrivances as email and ichat to conduct his business, relying instead on traditional means of interaction like letter-writing, and having his assistant read him his emails over the phone and then faxing Eddie's response to whoever sent the email.

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We love this note not only for its potent quotability and rubber-stamp Republican joke, but for the way several of its major elements neatly encapsulate the jumbling, tousle-headed stewpot of paradoxes that is the Vedman:

1. He forswears email, yet regularly employs the @-sign in lieu of "at."

2. He claims to be a longtime fan of both Dead Moon and ladies' rights, yet consistently fails to capitalize the name of the band's sole female member.

3. He qualifies Fred and Toody's "rock n roll-ness" by referencing a Thelonious Monk album.

As baffling as it is challenging and powerful.

By the way if you missed that link in the first line, Vice Records just put out the new Pierced Arrows album. Click here to buy it. It rules so good.