Stone Temple Pilots’ new singer Jeff Gutt felt a lot of stress before his first show with the legendary band in 2017. “It doesn’t get any more high-pressure than that,” Gutt told Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene recently. “So much was riding on everything at that time.”
But Gutt won over fans and the band has toured steadily ever since — plus they’re about to release their first acoustic album, Perdida. The album was recorded on vintage instruments in Nashville. Initially, it was meant to be only an EP, but the new approach inspired the group to write more, especially about heartbreak and grief.
“I was looking back at difficult moments in my life,” said Gutt, who wrote most of the lyrics. “I was trying to be vulnerable, and that’s a scary thing to do, but it’s also kind of comfortable.”
That sentiment comes across in the video for the opening track, “Fare Thee Well.” A black-and-white video directed by P.R. Brown (My Chemical Romance, John Mayer, Prince), it features the band playing in the studio as Gutt sings lyrics like “Hate to say goodbye to you/I can tell you’re gone/By the way I’m missing you.”
The group is about to launch its first acoustic tour in early February, an intimate run that includes two sold-out nights at New York’s Gramercy Theatre.