Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard says Eddie Vedder “did a great job” with Gigaton

Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard has praised Eddie Vedder’s work on their forthcoming album Gigaton, saying that the frontman “did a great job”.

“There was a pile of songs, and [Vedder] sort of took and really, in the last two months, mixed and sort of selected the tracks that really were going to be special,” Gossard said in an interview on Beats 1 radio on 22 January. “And he did such a great job of bringing everybody’s personalities out. It was probably different than any of us would’ve made individually, but it really captures, I think, the spirit of the band.”

Pearl Jam recently released the music video for Dance Of The Clairvoyants, their brand-new single from Gigaton. The song’s experimental nature was a departure from the band’s typical rock-oriented tones. Gossard described the track as “the outer edge of something that we haven’t tried before, a new way of configuring our sort of collaborative talents”.

Gossard also touched on Vedder’s lyrics, which he described as being clever in an abstract sense. “He’s not going to come out and say exactly in sort of very plain language maybe what you might think after reading the newspaper,” Gossard said. “But I think that his mysticism and his way of using words and art and music is a powerful sort of tonic. I think that underlying it all is going to continue to be a hopeful and beautiful, but at times, tragic message.”

Gigaton is Pearl Jam’s 11th studio effort and the band’s first LP since 2013’s Lightning Bolt. Co-produced with Josh Evans, the album is due for release on 27 March. Pearl Jam have also announced a 16-date North American tour in support of Gigaton, which kicks off on 18 March in Toronto and concludes on 19 April in California. The band will then follow up with a European summer leg that launches on 23 June in Frankfurt and wraps up on 23 July in Amsterdam.

For more dates and ticket pricing for Pearl Jam’s 2020 tour, click here.

For more music news, click here.