Top 100 Eddie Vedder Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I’m making music for music’s sake, and I have an audience I’m proud of.”

— Eddie Vedder

52. “I think what happens is when something becomes successful, then a lot of people take credit for it in such ways that it takes credit away from you.”

— Eddie Vedder

53. “I had a $1.50 from playing the ukulele after owning it seven minutes. I thought, “Hmmm, this has some possibilities.””

— Eddie Vedder

54. “Things like guitars and ukuleles, you should never part with it, because there will probably be good, healthy times spent, just playing and writing.”

— Eddie Vedder

55. “When I had a child, everyone was telling me that I was going to see the world through her eyes, and everything was going to get this nice gloss to it. I kept waiting for that to happen, and thought there was a real problem with me that it wasn’t.”

— Eddie Vedder

56. “The nice thing about money is that you can do good things with it. I still feel like if something needs to be done or we need to raise money for someone on death row, we can find ways to do it.”

— Eddie Vedder

57. “I’m having a hard time trying to figure out how to say things. I’m a little exhausted by the process.”

— Eddie Vedder

58. “Isn’t Timbaland a make of shoe? It’s a producer? I don’t know who that is. Oh well.”

— Eddie Vedder

59. “There’s been times when I’ve been standing in a line at a movie and someone’s hit me with something really heavy about someone really close and how our music has helped them get through it. Even in our darkest moments we try and find something beautiful.”

— Eddie Vedder

60. “No music is going to stop the war. What’s going to stop the war is a large amount of body bags, or a large amount of people in the streets, protesting it before it starts.”

— Eddie Vedder

61. “I think that if your approach is one where you don’t want to alienate anybody, you’re going to have to soften the viewpoint or the information that you’re offering to such an extent that it doesn’t have the power to make any difference. You have to take that risk.”

— Eddie Vedder

62. “Well there’s a lot of machines making music today too so you should expect perfection from them! Other than that it’s humans programming it which is actually why i still like it. But yeah, that sounds about right. Now what I’ve got to do is I’ve got to stop expecting it of myself.”

— Eddie Vedder

63. “If I’m not on tour or in the studio, I’m in nature somewhere, usually some kind of ocean. Playing music has afforded me that. It’s not lost on me that it’s a tremendous opportunity to be able to spend your life being surrounded by nature.”

— Eddie Vedder

64. “I’m an example of someone who never made it to university. I did have this dream to be a musician. I felt that this dream had an expiration date.”

— Eddie Vedder

65. “Gave her love away, put it in my pocket when it should of been framed!”

— Eddie Vedder

66. “I used to kind of blame someone for not being able to get through that – I’m talking about the addiction part – but I’ve had a few experiences recently where you don’t blame the person anymore.”

— Eddie Vedder

67. “I was living on the wrong side of the tracks in Evanston, Illinois, in a home for boys. We had these Jackson 5 records. I really related to their voices – they were about my age, but they were doing it.”

— Eddie Vedder

68. “The word religion has such bad connotations for me, that it’s been responsible for wars, and it shouldn’t be that way at all, it’s just the way the meaning of the word has evolved to me. I have to wonder what we did on this planet before religion.”

— Eddie Vedder

69. “You can’t be perfect. You can’t be the perfect father. You can’t be the perfect singer.”

— Eddie Vedder

70. “I don’t work so hard at trying to get every song to be three-dimensional and mean so much. I just want to breathe, right now, with the music.”

— Eddie Vedder

71. “When it comes to grunge or even just Seattle, I think there was one band that made the definitive music of the time. It wasn’t us or Nirvana, but Mudhoney. Nirvana delivered it to the world, but Mudhoney were the band of that time and sound.”

— Eddie Vedder

72. “I’m not ready to be that guy who can meet with world leaders and all that. It’s tremendous what Bono does. I don’t know if I could do it, not the way he does. I don’t think many people could.”

— Eddie Vedder

73. “I feel like we have to keep our eyes on the road. Being nostalgic is like taking an offramp and getting a sandwich – and then you get back on the highway. I don’t want to be spending the rest of my life at the gas station.”

— Eddie Vedder

74. “You mature as far as your understanding of what it’s going to take, and you increase your stamina. You don’t let frustration overtake you when you’re looking for change.”

— Eddie Vedder

75. “If at noon you sit down and there’s just silence or blank tape, in an hour if you have a song, that didn’t exist an hour ago. Now it exists and it might exist for a long time. There’s something empowering about that.”

— Eddie Vedder

76. “I realized in the early days I just didn’t edit at all. But I think you become a little more cagey with your lyrics when you know more people are going to hear them and make assumptions about you as a person. Realizing that, you want to be a little more opaque.”

— Eddie Vedder

77. “I think celebrities suck.”

— Eddie Vedder

78. “No matter how good you are, at some point your kids are gonna have to create their own independence and think that Mom and Dad aren’t cool, just to establish themselves. That’s what adolescence is about. They’re gonna go through that no matter what.”

— Eddie Vedder

79. “If it’s a good cause, I’ll play just about anything.”

— Eddie Vedder

80. “I had actually been going to Hawaii for quite a while before I ever picked up the uke. I think with anything new you’re going to get more enjoyment out of it if it comes to you quickly, and the uke facilitates that.”

— Eddie Vedder

81. “The one thing about going from the audience to the stage in just three years is that you know how it feels to be down there.”

— Eddie Vedder

82. “The interesting thing is that it seems like George W. Bush would have been happy being the president of anything. He could have been president of Major League Baseball.”

— Eddie Vedder

83. “It’s understandable why someone would like their entertainment to provide an escape from modern day worries and the reality of war. We feel this record creates a healthy opportunity to process some of these emotions rather than deny them.”

— Eddie Vedder

84. “Your pot laws are great! But your gun laws are even better!”

— Eddie Vedder

85. “I was able to apply ukulele to whatever I’m trying to write. It’s become part of songwriting for me, the knowledge I gained from hearing the melodies come out, and then applying that to guitar or vocals.”

— Eddie Vedder

86. “So much energy comes out of concerts sometimes, especially good ones that are really moving. And that energy, no matter how great the show is, it dissipates within two weeks or a month.”

— Eddie Vedder

87. “People on death row, the treatment of animals, women’s right to choose. So much in America is based on religious fundamentalist Christianity. Grow up! This is the modern world!”

— Eddie Vedder

88. “Our influences are who we are. It’s rare that anything is an absolutely pure vision; even Daniel Johnston sounds like the Beatles. And that’s the problem with the bands I’m always asked about, the ones derivative of the early Seattle sound. They don’t dilute their influences enough.”

— Eddie Vedder

89. “We’re not going to be the coolest rock stars in the world. We’re trying to be good musicians.”

— Eddie Vedder

90. “One thing you might suggest to a young band is don’t get involved in any kind of long-term contract because everything changes on a bimonthly basis: The way people hear music and access it, the way it is distributed.”

— Eddie Vedder

91. “After the Ramones, it was more about new wave for me than punk.”

— Eddie Vedder

92. “I’d like people to be educated on the voting machines, making sure that our democracy isn’t being hijacked by computer technology. There’s no reason there can’t be a paper trail on those machines.”

— Eddie Vedder

93. “Pretty much at all times music motivates me. How can I say this without sounding in any way proud of myself? Obviously I’ve always written songs that are critical of our government, and talk about our times. Hopefully you attempt to be timeless while doing it.”

— Eddie Vedder

94. “When I was 13, I got my first guitar, and I could sort of play Ted Nugent songs, but I couldn’t play the solos. But I could play along with entire Ramones songs.”

— Eddie Vedder

95. “Competition is healthy, if you can turn it off and on. When someone gets too cocky in victory, that can ruin the positive aspect.”

— Eddie Vedder

96. “There is a thing that happens when you are not as privileged and you start hanging out with a seedier crowd because you can afford to do the same things, And all of a sudden the big night out is sitting in somebody’s trailer, smoking something or getting hold of something to put up to your nose.”

— Eddie Vedder

97. “This little four-string songwriting tool started changing the way I brought songs to the group.”

— Eddie Vedder

98. “I would thank God, but I don’t believe in it.”

— Eddie Vedder

99. “That makes it even more offensive to me that she’s interested in our band and she did something for Slaughter.”

— Eddie Vedder

100. “I just finished touring, and I’m on a detox thing. It’s a heavy detox, so nothing in my belly except water, salt, and cayenne pepper.”

— Eddie Vedder