Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament has offered his own update on the next Pearl Jam album. During an appearance on Kyle Meredith With…, Ament said that while the band feels they’ve “earned the right to do whatever the fuck we want,” their latest effort isn’t quite done and “doesn’t feel like a record yet.”
The comments come just two weeks after Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard shared with Meredith that he felt the new album was “close to the finish line,” an assessment with which Ament gently disagrees. “The hardest part of [finishing] a record a lot of times is figuring out which songs go on the record and do we need to record another song and what’s the artwork and what’s the title and all that stuff,” Ament says, noting the band is planning on taking the rest of summer off with those questions left unanswered.
“Come September, we’re still gonna pick up those questions we have about where we’re at and we’re gonna ask those questions again,” he continues. “I think everybody hopes that we have a record out next year. If we have a record out next year, that means we’ll probably play a few more shows, and I think there’s a couple places we haven’t played in quite a while, so I think we have stuff penciled in.”
He cites the band’s drive to embrace their status rock royalty while utilizing each member’s strengths and desires as both a blessing and a challenge. “We’ve earned the right to sort of [do whatever we want], and that’s tough because there are five of us pulling the cart,” Ament explains. “Sometimes you end up pulling the cart in opposite directions. But, [it’s about] just embracing all of that, embracing everybody’s ideas, hopes, dreams, wishes, and styles… I think that’s what we hope for, musically. I think we want to turn the corner and access all the best parts of each other.”
As Ament sees it, each member of the band has a “superpower” or sorts, and when they all lean into each other, the total is greater than the sum of the parts. “We all have those hopes and dreams for what we think a new Pearl Jam song would be — hopefully, at the end of this, everybody feels like their characters are part of it,” he says. “That’s where we’re at as a band right now. Like, I want to hear Mike McCready blow the doors off. I want to hear a lyric from Ed that makes me laugh or makes me really sad, or, you know, really brutally sad — he can do that as good as anybody. I think everybody in the band has an ability that’s kind of a superpower. It’s like, ‘How do we pull those superpowers out of each other to write great music?’ Again, we’ve earned the right to do it however we want to. But I think showing off our strengths isn’t the worst way for this band to operate at this point.”
Earlier this year, Pearl Jam released 25th anniversary editions for Yield and Give Way. Ament also touches on these topics and much more in his interview on Kyle Meredith With…, so listen to the full thing above.
At the end of August, PJ is hitting the road for their 2023 tour. Check out the full list of dates, and grab your tickets here.
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