Song of the Day: Eddie Vedder, “Save It for Later”

Lots of TV shows lean on pop and rock songs to serve as their soundtracks, some more heavily than others (when medical shows proliferated, putting the word “breathe” in your song title almost guaranteed it would air during an ER scene). Some shows, like current critical darling “The Bear,” actually build scenes around the music.

The series about a tormented chef employed R.E.M.’s “Strange Currencies” as a recurring motif in its second season last year, resulting in a lot of people checking out the band’s catalog more than a decade after they called it quits. This season features Eddie Vedder’s solo version of the 1982 English Beat song “Save It for Later” in the theme song role.

Vedder’s quiet version is a cover of a cover. In 1985 Pete Townshend formed a short-lived supergroup called Deep End with David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. They wanted to perform Townshend’s acoustic arrangement of the song but couldn’t figure out the chord changes. So they phoned the Beat’s Dave Wakeling, who wrote the song. As Wakeling recalled it,

I got a phone call at 11 in the morning, and somebody gave me the phone and said, “It’s Pete Townshend for you.” And I said, “Of course it is, he phones about this time every Saturday doesn’t he?” [Laughs.] I thought it was somebody making a joke. I picked up very sarcastically, ‘Oh, hello Pete.’ And he said, ‘Oh, hello Dave, this is Peter Townshend here and I’m sitting with David Gilmour [of Pink Floyd], and we’re trying to work out your song ‘Save It for Later,’ but we can’t work out the tuning.’ They presumed it was DADGAD, and couldn’t make it work, and so I had to explain that I’d made a mistake and it was not DADGAD, it was DADAAD. And he laughed and said, ‘Oh, thank heavens for that! We’ve been breaking our fingers trying to get our hands around these chords.’

Wakeling wrote the song as a teenager – the title is a sophomoric joke if you hear “for later” as “fellator” – but his bandmates resisted recording it because it was too rockish for their ska/new wave repertoire. It finally appeared on their third LP, the last with their original lineup. It was only a minor hit in the UK, and couldn’t crack the top 40 in the U.S., but it became one of their signature songs.