Revitalized Pearl Jam rocks out on 8th album

Eddie Vedder

NEW YORK - Eddie Vedder chuckles when he looks back on the early years of Pearl Jam and how the group balanced the pressures of success: "You get growing pains when you get taller, but we got them when we were trying to shrink."

The Seattle quintet's 1991 Epic debut, "Ten," remains a modern-rock touchstone, having sold 9.4 million copies in the United States. But Pearl Jam grew famously uneasy with its sudden success, refusing to compromise its integrity in exchange for enduring mass popularity. No videos. No endorsements. A bare minimum of media interaction.

Instead, the band released a series of increasingly experimental albums that shook off nearly all but its most devoted fans. At Pearl Jam's no-two-the-same concerts, 10-minute jams, obscure B-sides and covers were given the same importance as the hits. As guitarist Stone Gossard notes, "We've gone through a period of rejecting what comes the most easy for us and trying for something beyond that."

But on the band's new self-titled eighth album, Pearl Jam sounds more at home in its skin than ever. The 13-track set probes the human toll of the post-September 11 world via a rich tapestry of characters and narrators. The album arrives May 2 via J Records, Pearl Jam's first for the label after ending its career-long association with Epic in 2003.

Stepping back from the unvarnished, anti-President Bush sentiments of 2002's "Riot Act" and the 2004 Vote for Change tour, the new set finds Vedder re-embracing the storytelling of classics like "Alive" and "Black." For a time, the artist considered using segues and narration to tie the project together under a single concept, but ultimately he says a less-structured theme "just fell right into place without even thinking about it."

"Through telling stories, you may be able to transmit an emotion or a feeling or an observation of modern reality rather than editorializing, which we've seen plenty of these days," Vedder says, adding that writing from perspectives other than his own was "a right that I'd forgotten that I had."

Gossard, guitarist Mike McCready, bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Matt Cameron also have upped the musical ante on the breathless punk of "Comatose," the gripping rocker "Life Wasted," the brooding, psychedelic closer "Inside Job" and "Come Back," an R&B-drenched love song that builds to an anthemic finish. "This record feels like a coming together again in terms of accepting our natural strengths and also incorporating the best of our experiments," Gossard says.

That recipe has revitalized Pearl Jam on modern-rock radio, a format it dominated in the early 1990s alongside Seattle brethren Nirvana, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden. First single "World Wide Suicide" became the fastest-charting song of the group's career, reaching No. 1 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart in just two weeks.

In another unusual move, the song was made available for free download a week ahead of its radio date via Pearl Jam's website and its myspace.com page. Several stations also began spinning album track "Unemployable," the B-side to the "World Wide Suicide" single on iTunes.

Asked why he thinks the track has exploded out of the gate, Gossard replies, "It sounds very raw. The hook is really immediate. Plus, everybody can relate to the concept of the world seeming very out of control."

By all accounts, Pearl Jam needed a fresh start after the expiration of its Epic deal.

"I don't know if any label could have kept up with us because of the way things evolved," Vedder admits. "If right at the outset we were selling 10 million records, and years down the road we were selling 1 million, and we were fine with it, I can understand why they'd feel a little crazy when they wanted to achieve past successes."

According to J Records vice president of marketing/A&R Matt Shay, who spent four years helping run Gossard's now-defunct Loosegroove imprint, the label began inquiring about Pearl Jam's availability as far back as 2001.

Once a formal agreement was in place (band and label declined to reveal specifics of the deal), J executives left Pearl Jam alone for more than a year while the band finished the album. "J was open to our style from the get-go," Gossard says. "They weren't expecting us to do something that was unnatural for us."

It was also paramount that J continue working with the band's Ten Club fan organization, which oversees Pearl Jam's official bootleg program. Since 2000, the band has sold 1.8 million copies of physical bootleg CDs in the United States; thousands more have been downloaded since the initiative went all-digital last year.

Ten Club head Tim Bierman says fans who pre-order the new set through pearljam.com will receive a bonus disc of the band's January 31, 1992, opening set for Keith Richards in New York as well as a special code that allows for a full download of "Pearl Jam" at 12:01 a.m. EDT on street date..

In a move aimed to strengthen its ties with the independent retail community, the band will release the seven-song EP "Live at Easy Street" exclusively through the Coalition of Independent Music Stores' Junket Boy imprint on June 20. As a teaser, fans who purchase "Pearl Jam" at CIMS outlets will receive a free download card for a cover of X's "The New World" with John Doe taken from the EP, CIMS president Don Van Cleave says.

Even as its record sales eroded, Pearl Jam remained a concert juggernaut, grossing US$36 million from 68 shows reported to Billboard Boxscore since 2003. Ament is particularly excited about spotlighting the new songs on the band's world tour, which begins May 9 in Toronto and features a series of co-headlining dates with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers in July. Opening acts include My Morning Jacket, Sonic Youth and Robert Pollard.

"We've actually rehearsed more for this tour than we've ever rehearsed in our lives," he says. "Matt is singing a lot of the vocal harmonies, and he's just killing it. The benefit of playing in a Kiss cover band when you're 12 is that you learn to sing!"

Following a one-off April 20 show in London, Pearl Jam's first European tour in six years will get under way in August. It encompasses the group's maiden festival gigs since June 30, 2000, when nine fans were killed during a crowd surge at the beginning of its set at Denmark's Roskilde Festival. Gossard says, "We have a heightened awareness of what needs to happen every night so people are as safe as they can possibly be."

Once the itinerary wraps in November in Australia, the band will choose between additional roadwork in 2007 or starting a new album. From Pearl Jam's perspective, emerging from a period of uncertainty with an album its members love was the best of all possible outcomes.

"We're going to make better and better records as we get older, especially considering this one kind of rocks harder," Gossard says with a tinge of bemusement. "Why should we be rocking harder now? Isn't this when we're supposed to ease into the whole Pink Floyd groove?"

- REUTERS/Billboard