Opening up about the album, Pearl Jam members Eddie Vedder and Jeff Ament appeared on the Bill Simmons Podcast for a marathon two-hour interview recently, discussing the band’s 7-year hiatus from releasing new albums.
Speaking on their eagerness to return to the road, Vedder said:
“We’re kind of reclusive by nature. So, in some ways it feels normal to be away from people, that’s not necessarily out of my wheelhouse…but I just keep thinking that first time we’ll be in front of people, it’s even hard to imagine when or how, it’s going to be different. It’s not like we didn’t appreciate it before, it’s just even tenfold.”
Regarding the seven-year creative journey to Gigaton, he revealed:
“It grew on its own. It just started different, and it ended different, and everything that happened in the middle was different, and that’s what felt great about it. At some point, we had to finish. At some point, we zeroed in and thought, ‘Okay, I think we got this and now let’s nail these bits and pieces” …This last fall we really leaned in heavy and hard and gave ourselves a little bit of a deadline finally, which was cool, I thought it was very mature and grown-up of us to say, ‘Okay, now let’s actually finish! That can be the hard part’…After all of that fun, now we have to set it down in concrete.”
In terms of the full sequence and final vision, he related it to a formative childhood memory:
“Certain things find their spot. It’s like a setlist. I think that’s why they maybe let me take a first crack at some of that stuff, because of the whole setlist thing. We still make records to be listened to—not that everyone will listen to a record track one to twelve in a row or side A or Side B—but we still make ‘em in case somebody does want to listen to it like that, that’s how we make em…In a way, it’s also like a live show, we put the songs together in a way that have a flow and an energy, the one song passes the torch to the next…Really I think a lot of comes back to keeping score when I was a little kid in baseball games…Obviously, I wasn’t good at math and didn’t go to school for acounting, but what I did do was stare at the scoreboard at Wrigley Field and I think that really helped me.”
