NEW YORK – Monkeywrench/J Records’ Into the Wild soundtrack featuring original music written and performed by Eddie Vedder makes it’s chart debut at #2 on the Billboard Soundtracks chart and  #11 on the Billboard Top 200 this week with 39,331 albums sold. The Into the Wild soundtrack features nine original songs, including “Guaranteed”, as well as cover songs “Hard Sun” and ”Society.“  

Critics have already embraced the soundtrack, Rolling Stone Magazine gave it 3 ½ stars and said  “…Eddie Vedder tells the young man’s story on the soundtrack to Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, tossing his weighty baritone onto earthy, folky tracks that temper the romance of absolute freedom with an eerie foreboding.” The Los Angeles Times raves, “What began with Penn’s request for a handful of songs to fit into his nearly complete film grew almost by accident into a brief but cohesive album that recapitulates the movie’s journey in miniature.”  USA Today says “…the singer’s pretty, folk-based tunes have an open, slightly ragged, organic simplicity that suits the tale’s panoramic grandeur and forlorn undercurrent.” And Sean Penn says in an interview with the New York Times “I deliberately underwrote parts of the script because I felt that the music and the lyrics would tell part of the story,” he said. “I liked a lot the way that works in ‘The Graduate’ and in Hal Ashby movies like ‘Harold and Maude.’ His original notion was to use several different singer-songwriters, but while watching Mr. Hirsch’s performance, he said, he started hearing Eddie Vedder’s voice. He showed a rough cut to Mr. Vedder, who responded with a score that is big and soulful.” 

Inspired by the true-life story of Christopher McCandless, singer and guitarist Eddie Vedder wrote and performed music for the forthcoming feature film adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s best-selling literary work Into the Wild. Written and directed by Sean Penn, Into the Wild stars Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Hal Holbrook, Catherine Keener, Jena Malone, Kristen Stewart, Vince Vaughn and Brian Dierker. The film was released in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, September 21st and will be released nationwide on October 5th.