Nordic fan portrait: Sofie – The new generation

When you look at the audience at a Pearl Jam show, you’ll find that most fans are somewhere between the age of 40 to 50 years old with a small majority of men. There is nothing surprising in this fact (or rather than fact, it’s my personal experience) considering the genre of music that Pearl Jam plays and the time they had their big break through in the nineties. Most of us were teens during those years, the band was pretty hard to avoid back then, and research shows that people form their musical identity in their early teens or a little earlier. So when I see a new young(er) face in the fan community, it always catches my eye and sparks my curioisity. How do people discover Pearl Jam these days when there’s no music on MTV and the media in general is dominated by crappy meaningless pop?

29-year-old Sofie Thybo Pedersen showed up at a Pearl Jam Nordic gathering at a bar in central Copenhagen in January. She showed up alone and knew nobody there but felt like a part of the Jamily right away, and that’s what’s so cool about the Jamily: You’re never a stranger. You’re a part of the tribe. The day after the meeting I contacted Sofie to ask if she wanted to do an interview for the blog, so I could ask her more about her story of becoming a Pearl Jam fan and share it with the world.

Sofie Thybo Pedersen in Prague before the Pearl Jam show, 2018
Sofie Thybo Pedersen in Prague before the Pearl Jam show, 2018
Continue reading “Nordic fan portrait: Sofie – The new generation”

Nordic fan portrait: Jane – It’s all about the music

This is the first interview in what we’re planning to be a small series of stories about Nordic Pearl Jam fans that we have gotten to know through the Pearl Jam Nordic community over the last couple of years.

The first time I met Jane was at a get-together at a bar the day before the Eddie Vedder show in Denmark in 2017. Pearl Jam Nordic had arranged a small informal pre-party, the first of its kind in the PJN history, and Jane and her friend Majbritt showed up. They had just arrived on the bus from Berlin, where they had seen Eddie the night before, and apologized for looking tired and make-up-less. No need to apologize, we’ve all been there, haven’t we? And the glow from the happiness of seeing Ed outshines any fancy make-up anytime.

I knew about Jane’s existence even before this evening, as she is quite active on social media and also plays a part in the book ‘Pearl Jam: The More You Need – The Less You Get’ by Henrik Tuxen. More on that later.

Our paths have crossed several times since the first time we met. The Danish Pearl Jam world is small. We drove to Malmö, Sweden together to watch Let’s Play Two last fall because it premiered in Sweden before Denmark. We met up again for the Let’s Play Two event by Sonos in Copenhagen, where Jane was my +1, and we even won a Danny Clinch photo competition together based on a photo from our Swedish adventure. The price was a print of the legendary photo of Eddie’s jump at Wrigley Field the year before. We also met at the Pearl Jam show in Berlin earlier this year – even quite literally bumped into each other on the ferry to Germany as we happened to be travelling on the same bus. Continue reading “Nordic fan portrait: Jane – It’s all about the music”