Eddie Vedder & Nick Zinner remix Vedder’s original score “Cartography” - “Return to Mount Kennedy” [film]
Last year I music supervised a really special documentary film called “Return To Mount Kennedy” on which we had Eddie Vedder do the original score in addition to licensing quite a bit of classic 90s/early 2000s Northwest music.
At the after party for the LA premier, our producer (and subject of the film) Bob Whittaker introduced me to Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the three of us sat down and talked about how Nick had this idea to do a “remix” of sorts with one of Eddie’s score cues and that he wanted to incorporate Robert F. Kennedy’s inspiring speech from 1968 on the death of Martin Luther King Jr. Bob of course being best friends with Eddie and very close with the Kennedy estate was trying to help wrangle this idea into fruition but they had some questions about legality and copyright before bringing it to Sub Pop as a potential release. So, we talked it over and I said I’d look into it. About a week later they sent me a rough mix of Nick’s idea and I thought it sounded super cool. As fate would have it that RFK speech is in the public domain as well as the Kennedy estate’s recording of it so there didn’t end up being much red tape to this after all. From there I helped the team at Sup Pop where I could to usher this thing into the world and now about a year later here we are!
The instrumental piece form the film that Nick and Eddie chose to work with is called “Cartography” and I think they have managed to create something truly haunting and timely with this remix. The track is available now along with the original composition as a 7” from the Sub Pop singles club pressed by Third Man Press on clear vinyl.
Having grown up in Seattle in the 90s myself as a product of the “grunge” explosion it’s hard to explain how cool it is for me it be associated with one of my musical heroes like this -not to mention my love for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs! Check out the Pitchfork blurb below and the music video by Julian Gross featuring footage from the film below that.
(Click photo for Pitchfork article)