On Pearl Jam’s new 25th anniversary of Vs. radio special on SiriusXM, Eddie Vedder discussed having a breakdown at the end of recording the album. Alternative Nation transcribed his comments.
“At the end of the record I didn’t feel like it was done. I still had some changes, and lyric changes, and changes in the production of it all. I pretty much had a breakdown in the kitchen the last night, because we were closing up, and I felt like what we just did, they were going to put it out real quick. Things were happening quick, and there were forces stronger than us that were dictating things at that point.
I literally had a breakdown in the kitchen, what is going to happen here? Brendan O’Brien assured me it would be okay, ‘We’re not ready to put it out, we’ll do a few fixes,’ which we did. We all kind of went our separate ways after that for a week, which felt like the longest we’d ever been apart at that time.”
Stone Gossard said, “Everybody just got out of there, and Brendan I think took those tracks, and he must have mixed them there. I remember leaving with some mixed tracks, I don’t think they were mastered, but I remember leaving with some mixed tracks and driving home from California with Mike McCready, and listening to some of those and thinking we did a good job. I was excited about the heaviness, and the non-heaviness. I was excited that we had a record that had these extremes on it.”
