Eddie Vedder will contribute a song to Christian Bale’s ‘Furnace’

EXCLUSIVE: Eddie Vedder long ago made his mark in Hollywood, writing and/or recording notable songs for “Dead Man Walking,” “Eat Pray Love” and most of the “Into The Wild” soundtrack, among others.

You can soon add another notch to his filmic resume. The Pearl Jam frontman will pen and record a new track for “Out of the Furnace,” the dark thriller starring Christian Bale that will hit theaters this year. Several previously recorded Vedder songs also probablly will be featured in the film, according to a person familiar with the production who was not authorized to talk about it publicly.

Starring Bale and Woody Harrelson and directed by Scott Cooper, the drama has a brooding, Pearl Jam-ish quality: It tells the story of two brothers in a down-and-out Pennsylvania town who get caught up in the web of violent crime.

Vedder hardly needs Hollywood to up his profile. But he may get that boost just the same with this film. Cooper previously directed “Crazy Heart,” which stirred plenty of attention for its tunes: The T Bone-Burnett produced soundtrack was widely acclaimed, and Ryan Bingham’s “The Weary Kind” won an Oscar, a Grammy and a Golden Globe.

Vedder and his band have been mixing it up with moviedom lately. The band was the subject of the 2011 documentary, “Pearl Jam: Twenty,” in which the normally press-ambivalent group allowed early enthusiast Cameron Crowe to interview and shoot them behind the scenes. The result was an in-depth look at a group that has managed to move past its reluctant voice-of-a-generation beginnings and endure for more than two decades.

“I think pretty much everything in the last 10 years has been really good. We’re in a kind of golden-years period. We have families now, and we’re just really happy to be playing live,” Vedder told The Times at the Toronto Film Festival about 16 months ago. “Before that it was harder. I’m not saying we’re diamond-like, but we were formed by pressure, and it seems like in the last 10 years we’ve been able to cut the diamond and see the facets.”

ALSO:

Pearl Jam: Twenty: Movie Review

Toronto 2011: Pearl Jam comes out of its shell

Pearl Jam to play concerts in Chicago and Canada in July

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