Eddie Vedder

Eddie Vedder was working night shifts at a petrol station in San Diego when the demo reached him that became Pearl Jam. The record here keeps that detail, and it is worth keeping, because the chart is almost entirely about work.

He was born at Evanston on 23 December 1964 with six of his ten planets in earth, seven in mutable signs, and not a single one in air. Earth is materials and patience; mutable is adaptability; air is the faculty that steps back and views the situation from a comfortable distance. A chart with that much of the first two and none of the third belongs to somebody who keeps working and adjusting and does not get the relief of perspective while doing it.

Four of those planets group in Virgo: the Moon, Mars, Uranus and Pluto. Virgo is doing the thing properly and treating work as the price of being acceptable, and having drive, disruption and pressure all inside it is a severe arrangement. Mercury squares Mars a quarter of a degree from the exact angle, which is thought and action colliding: arguing for its own sake, impatience with slower thinking, and the habit of saying the true thing in the most damaging available way. For a singer whose public register has always been earnest rather than smooth, that is the aspect doing the work.

There is a T-square holding his Moon, Venus and Saturn, with the Moon square Venus half a degree off. Feeling, affection and cost locked together with no resolution available. It is an uncomfortable configuration and a productive one, and three decades of songs about exactly that discomfort is what it has been spent on.

A band that stayed together for thirty years, through a decade that consumed almost all of its contemporaries, is what six planets in earth look like when they are given something to be loyal to.