5/18/2017: eddie > chris

Last night I emailed an old friend for the first time in nearly 4 years. We lived in the same house and were basically best buds in the early 90’s right when the whole Grunge thing was exploding. Soundgarden's "Badmotorfinger", Pearl Jam’s "Ten", Alice in Chains “Dirt” and Nirvana’s “Nevermind” are four of my favorite 75 albums of all time.

Here’s a screenshot of the email I sent to Matt, right above the last communication we had (this is me just searching my gmail for his name, which shows all communications in the order they happened and you can see the 4 year gap):

Here is the email itself (note: I’m just messing around with an old friend with the crazy verbiage, it’s not meant to be serious and he would know that):

(Just to clarify the screenshot above, which shows two communications. I responded to my own email to him before he had a chance to see the original so that he would get both thoughts at once before responding, even though he would never respond at all).

The singer I’m mentioning is Eddie Vedder. His band, Pearl Jam, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a couple months ago.

Here’s the key to all of this: the very next morning, after sending the emails above, I woke up to the following tweet and had no idea what was even going on until I found out Chris Cornell committed suicide last night:

I ponder the "coincidental" death of Chris Cornell on the SAME NIGHT I was giving one of his top competitors props in an email to an old friend who used to listen to their music with me (Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, etc). I sing along to Eddie and Chris all the time, but I'm a bigger Eddie fan.

The even creepier part of all of this is that Andrew Wood, the first of all these Seattle singers to die (from the band Motherlovebone, which would eventually become Pearl Jam), looks like he could be a Matt clone (the friend I’m emailing above).

They were also both born on January 8th. AND, when Andrew Wood died, it actually led the way to Eddie Vedder replacing him as the lead singer of Pearl Jam. ANNND, I first met Matt when I moved to Boston, only a year after Andrew Wood died.

So, the guy I’m emailing to tell him to suck it because Eddie Vedder (someone Matt wasn't a big fan of) is now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, actually looks like he’s the guy who died to help make it all a reality. AND Chris Cornell dies on the same night of the whole communication.

Andrew Wood:

Matt (fuzzy screenshot from a video of us playing live is all I have). Even though it’s hard to tell. The vibe, the forehead, the hair, the nose, etc. Matt could have easily been Andrew in some new form that I got to be friends with right after Andrew died: