Pearl Jam fans hardly need encouragement to check out lead warbler Eddie Vedder's solo debut, but there's much here for those who've stayed on the fence about Vedder's main gig. Vastly stripped down and largely self-played, the soundtrack to Sean Penn's 2007 movie is a deeply personal effort, inspired in part by the overlap between the singer's personal history and that of Into the Wild protagonist Christopher McCandless. Like Vedder, who covered the same subject in Pearl Jam's "Alive," McCandless was informed in his teenage years that the man he'd been raised to believe his father was in fact his stepfather — a revelation that prompted him to sever his ties to home and head for the Alaskan wilderness, where he eventually perished.

Vedder, who sometimes felt in the studio as if he were channeling forces rather than controlling them, puts himself inside McCandless' skin — sometimes to a fault. The all-purpose rejection of "Society," one of two songs Vedder did not write himself, comes off more adolescent pique than principled stand. But "Guaranteed" and "Rise" successfully explore the character from the inside-out, balancing his self-proclaimed purity with the natural overstatement of a young idealist.

Scoring many of the songs to… read more »