Pearl Jam + Coldplay Will Headline Global Citizen Festival

It turns out Global Citizen Festival did in fact let the cat out of the bag when it published a Pearl Jam biography to its website earlier this week. The annual event has officially announced that the Eddie Vedder-fronted outfit will headline this year’s concert, along with Coldplay, Beyonce and Ed Sheeran. It’s also pretty safe to assume now that this was the New York City-related special announcement Pearl Jam hinted at via their socials at the beginning of the month.

Global Citizen’s Pearl Jam write-up may have taken some of the surprise out of today’s (July 9) announcement, but it also doesn’t come as too big of a shock that Coldplay will share the stage, considering frontman Chris Martin’s new 15-year role as creative director for the concert series.

Global Citizen Festival -- which works with the Global Poverty Project to combat extreme poverty -- will take place on the Great Lawn in Central Park on Saturday, Sept. 26. You can grab free tickets here by pledging to take an “Action Journey,” which involves campaigning or volunteering in order to persuade the U.S. State Department to dedicate 50 percent of its foreign aid budget to the world’s poorest countries. V.I.P. tickets will go on sale via Ticketmaster on Friday (July 10) at 10AM.

Perhaps also unsurprising, the concert will be streamed by Tidal, which is part-owned by both Martin and Beyonce. It will also be broadcasted by MSNBC, NBC, YouTube, iHeartRadio and the BBC.

“We love the Global Citizen movement and we love opening for Beyonce so this ticks both boxes,” Martin said in a statement (via Billboard).

“We hope Pearl Jam fans sign up to become Global Citizens,” the Seattle rockers' guitarist Stone Gossard said, “not just to earn tickets to the show -- but to be part of a movement that encourages leaders of nations with the greatest wealth to apply aid, trade and governance policies in support of nations and communities in the greatest need. People living on less than $1.50-a-day deserve the opportunity to lift themselves up out of extreme poverty.”

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