Compared to my music obsession, I’m not big on movies. Sometimes it’s years before I see a film. Case in point: This weekend I watched Fight Club for the first time. As for current flicks, I’ve done better. Still haven’t seen The Hangover, though I have been to Star Trek, Up, Away We Go, and Brüno (and two of those were free previews).

I say all of this only because while I was aware of Into The Wild, the 2007 Sean Penn-directed film based on Jon Krakauer’s book, and knew that Eddie Vedder had done the soundtrack, I hadn’t dug much deeper. Because then I would have heard Vedder’s cover of Indio’s “Hard Sun” much sooner. As it is, XRT happened to be playing it one morning this week when my alarm went off.

It took me a minute to process what I was hearing (I wasn’t fully awake yet), and then I was curious as to how Vedder came to cover the song. I hadn’t heard Indio’s “Hard Sun” in years, probably since college. Indio is/was Gordon Peterson, a Canadian singer-songwriter who released just one album, 1989’s Big Harvest, produced by Joni Mitchell’s now ex-husband, Larry Klein. “Hard Sun,” with backing vocals from Mitchell and Brenda Russell, was released as a single and reached #34 on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart.

Big Harvest didn’t sell well, and A&M dropped Indio. Peterson left the music business, and has rarely been heard from since. Just a few months prior to the release of Into The Wild, however, Peterson contacted an Indio fansite via email, explaining that at the time, he didn’t “have whatever type of personality it required to endure the dark valleys that occur all too often in the business. It overwhelmed me and that was that.”

According to a Metro Toronto interview with Eddie Vedder, Sean Penn had Indio’s “Hard Sun” in an early cut of Into The Wild when he brought Vedder aboard. “Sean, at one point, knew Gordon [Peterson] or had been in contact with him or had friends who were friends of his. And Sean has really good, really eclectic musical tastes … I think he knew this fellow, Gordon, and loved this song.” Penn asked Vedder to cover “Hard Sun” for the film’s soundtrack. Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney contributes backing vocals:

“I tried to be really true to [Peterson’s] delivery,” says Vedder of his “Hard Sun” cover. “It’s a great, great song. But I’ve not met him or talked to him. I hope he liked it.”

Purchase Eddie Vedder – “Hard Sun” via iTunes, Amazon MP3.