Eddie Vedder channeled his inner Jackson Maine at the Innings Festival in Tempe, Arizona, on Sunday night by performing “Maybe It’s Time” from “A Star Is Born.”
And no, Vedder wasn’t just jumping on the bandwagon surrounding the Oscar-nominated musical. The Pearl Jam singer was actually a huge influence on Bradley Cooper’s lead character.
“I went up to Seattle and spent four or five days with him and I asked him 9,000 questions,” Cooper said of his friendship with Vedder in a September 2018 interview with Yahoo! Entertainment. “And he gave me minor, little things that only musicians know about what to do, just aesthetically and the inner workings.”
As for the “American Sniper” star’s plan to remake the classic movie, “He thought it was crazy I was going to do this movie,” the actor-director continued. “He was like, ‘What? Bro, don’t do that.’”
Vedder performed “Maybe It’s Time,” the folksy ballad which was written by Jason Isbell, that Maine performs in a drag bar shortly after meeting Lady Gaga’s Ally, live to the stage on Sunday, sparking an instant reaction to from the audience and the songwriter himself.
“Holy s— Eddie Vedder sang my Bradley Cooper song in his set tonight,” Isbell tweeted. “That is by far the strangest sentence I’ve ever composed but it’s certainly a huge honor. I was 12 when ‘Ten’ came out and by god I learned how to play every song on it.”
Watch Vedder’s performance above, and you’ve still got a few more days to catch “A Star Is Born” back in theaters this week. The new “encore” version from Warner Bros. features 12 additional minutes of footage, including extended takes of songs and one entirely new song not previously heard in the film or on the soundtrack album.