Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard described the band's new single, “Dance Of The Clairvoyants,” as “the outer edge of something that we haven't tried before, a new way of configuring our sort of collaborative talents.”
But also in the interview with Beats One, Gossard insisted that the rest of the group's new album, Gigaton, won't follow the same musical path. Gossard explained, “There's definitely some really straight-ahead rock songs. There's some very spare and very simple ballads. It's got it all, I think. And it's really us. We really did it by ourselves.”
Gossard also praised singer Eddie Vedder's work on getting the LP into shape, saying, “There was a pile of songs and he sort of took and really, really, in the last two months, mixed and sort of selected the tracks that really were going to be special. And he did such a great job of bringing everybody's personalities out . . . it really captures, I think, the spirit of the band.”
Gossard told us why he thinks the band remains strong after nearly 30 years together: “I mean, I think we all really respect each other. We've been together long enough that we know how lucky we are to be in this position. So I think there's a lot of gratitude in the band and a lot of like, when we show up together we're like, 'Wow, we have our own warehouse and we get to plug in our amps and we're gonna write some new songs and somebody cares about it and, you know, we're gonna put a record out and we sold some tickets and . . . ' I mean, these things are not just things we take for granted, because we're totally aware of how fortunate we are.”
Gigaton arrives on March 27th and is Pearl Jam's first studio album since 2013's Grammy-winning Lightning Bolt. Pearl Jam will embark on its first leg of North American tour dates in support of Gigaton this spring, kicking off on March 18th in Toronto.