Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard explained how the group’s upcoming album, Gigaton, captures “the spirit of the band” in a new interview with Zane Lowe on Beats 1 radio.
The first single from Gigaton, “Dance of the Clairvoyants,” found the band exploring funkier and more experimental sonic territories, with Gossard saying the track exemplifies “the outer edge of something that we haven’t tried before, a new way of configuring our sort of collaborative talents.” But he went on to note that “Dance of the Clairvoyants” is just one of several flavors on the record.
“There’s definitely some really straight-ahead rock songs,” he said. “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. [Eddie Vedder] did a great job. 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 was probably different than any of us would’ve made individually, but it really captures, I think, the spirit of the band.”
Gossard also touched on Vedder’s lyrics, which he called “stunning” and said grapple with the weight of the world in clever and abstract ways. “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 will be released March 27th, and it marks Pearl Jam’s first album since 2013’s Lightning Bolt. The band is set to embark on a 16-date North American tour March 18th in Toronto.