“Haven’t there been moments over the last few years when you asked yourself, ‘Am I seeing things?’ ” says Jakob Dylan, explaining to the Smoking Section the title of his first solo album, Seeing Things. While his Wallflowers have been on hiatus, Dylan spent 2007 visiting Rick Rubin’s studio, where he laid down minimalist acoustic tracks that deal with the darkness of these times — “Evil Is Alive and Well” and “All Day and All Night” — and more contented tunes like “Something Good This Way Comes.” “This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and I couldn’t be happier,” says Dylan. “It had nothing to do with clocking in or clocking out and setting up pinball machines and hiring a secretary. Rick provided the environment and offered incredibly useful judgment about where the songs were headed. It’s intangible, but Rick is right more than anybody I’ve ever worked with.”
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“It’s like auditory Red Bull,” Pharrell Williams tells the S.S., sitting behind a console at Electric Lady studios in Manhattan before introducing the new N.E.R.D. track “Everybody Nose,” which clocks in at a breakneck pace of 140 beats per minute. “This song’s about when all the hot chicks disappear from the dinner table — you know where they’re going.” The new N.E.R.D. disc, Seeing Sounds — their first in four years — features a cut about attention-deficit disorder (”Anti-Matter”) plus “Spaz,” which will certainly inspire clubgoers to spaz. Williams is stoked about N.E.R.D.’s slot on the Glow in the Dark Tour, launching in April, with Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco and Rihanna: “We’re gonna bring some energy to the game. It’s gonna be retarded!”
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It’s been said before, and the S.S. will say it again: Free the West Memphis 3! On his solo tour in April, Eddie Vedder is auctioning off second-row seats, post-show meet-and-greets and autographed posters to benefit the defense fund of those three kids from Arkansas who have wallowed in jail for a dozen years for murders they insist they did not commit. (Bid on tix, donate straight to the fund or learn about the injustice at wm3.org.) Vedder has spent the winter surfing in Oahu, writing and hanging with his wife and three-year-old daughter. “It’s a good place to be in a screwed-up world,” he says. “The water is where I get most of my thinking done, and the writing just starts happening.” And start packing the RV for Bonnaroo: With Pearl Jam, Chris Rock and Metallica on the bill, America’s greatest festival just got a little better.