The biggest hit on Pearl Jam‘s Yield was arguably “Do the Evolution,” and according to Matt Bayles, who did engineering work on the record, the song was actually part of a new surprise recording session after the album was already completed.
“Pearl Jam’s Yield – another chance to work with Brendan O’Brien and Nick on a PJ record. No complaints here. Tracked some demos before their arrival, per usual. This time two made the record, All Those Yesterday’s and the hidden track, Hummus. But a third made it on from a session after the record was done.
Stone asked me to meet up with him at Litho to work on a couple of songs he wanted to pitch for inclusion on the record. His typical studio method was playing a drum beat, making a loop and then building the song on the loop. At that time we almost always used a micro cassette recorder to add so crunch time the tone. The song on Yield that came out of that session was Do The Evolution.
Once we had a musical skeleton we sent a rough to Ed and he came in the next day to work on it. He had me do some tape edits to fine tune the arrangement and then he started singing. All I can say is some magic happened that day. It came together so easily.
Ed wanted me to distort the vocal during the comping so I ran it through a tube compressor (LA-2A) as I comped. Thereby locking in the tone you hear on the final mix. We did the ‘hallelujah’ vocals stacks, added the organ, had Mike come in and lay down some Mike on the track and Stone put some placeholder bass down. A copy of the 2′ tape was sent to Jack for him to overdub drums, the bass was redone, and then it was added to the record after mixing.
Fun fact: In the ‘admire me, admire my home’ section you can hear clanking intermittently through the part. That is Ed hitting the music stand with his pencil as he was singing. It just so happened that those vocals were the ones we wanted to use. The distortion of the compressor brought out something amazing in the clank, so we rolled with it. That section also features the original drum loop Stone made, for those who are curious what that building block sounds like.” Pearl Jam are still hard at work today, confirming a new album with Yoko Ono and Jack Johnson yesterday.
