Eddie Vedder is delivering Donald Trump a message through song

Pearl Jam is doing their best to not join the growing list of artists forced to send Donald Trump cease and desists over his use of their music at his campaign rallies. But while their new single openly describes how much of an evil loser the former president is, if he somehow missed Neil Young, Phil Collins, and The Village People having bones to pick with him, there’s a not-insignificant chance he’d miss the (not so) subtleties in Pearl Jam’s “Wreckage,” too.

“There is a guy in the United States who is still saying he didn’t lose an election, and people are reverberating and amplifying that message as if it is true,” frontman Eddie Vedder recently told The Times when asked about the meaning behind “Wreckage,” a mostly acoustic track from their latest album, Dark Matter. “I no longer give a fuck/who is wrong and who’s right./This game of winner takes all/and all means nothing left/spoils go the victor/and the other left for dead,” Vedder sings in the song’s bridge.

“Trump is desperate. I don’t think there has ever been a candidate more desperate to win, just to keep himself out of prison and to avoid bankruptcy,” Vedder continued to the Times, referring to 45's ongoing trial. “It is all on the line, and he’s out there playing the victim—at least they’re doing this to me, because if not they would be doing it to you—but you haven’t falsified your tax records. You don’t have classified information in your basement. So the song is saying, let’s not be driven apart by one person, especially not a person without any worthy causes.”

While Vedder said Neil Young, who the band toured with in the ‘90s, was the one who inspired him to really get political, this isn’t the first time the artist has taken on Trump’s whole agenda. Pearl Jam’s 2018 track, “Can’t Deny Me,” is also believed to be about Trump, especially since Vedder colorfully referred to the former president as “crazy like a narcissistic motherfucker” while introducing the song at a performance in Amsterdam, according to Far Out.

For now, though, Vedder would prefer to leave Trump in the dust and go back to more of the topics that made him famous in the first place. “I can’t wait,” he said, when the interviewer asked whether or not he thought Trump’s time was passing. “Most thoughtful people are going through a bit of PTSD about it now, so maybe you’re right.”