Mike McCready Says He'll try his damndest to get new Pearl Jam album out this year, talks new songs

Here are a couple of excerpts from PremierGuitar.com‘s new interview with Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready:

On Pearl Jam’s new album: “Well, we’re gearing up to finish the second part of the record that we started about two years ago. We all decided to pull back a little bit after we had done about seven songs, which I think are going to be on the next record. I’m not really sure. It all depends upon how this next session goes. I have a feeling that we’ll have something out this year. We are all very prolific in bringing in ideas and we’re all in conversation and are starting to rehearse in about a month. I feel like we’ll have something by this year. I don’t know that everyone in the band feels that way, but I’m going to do my damndest to move it along if I can have any kind of say in it. I would really like to get it out this year because we would really like to do some touring and things like that.”

On Pearl Jam’s songwriting process: “It’s all of those things. Specifically for myself, I will demo ideas in my studio and try to make them as good as possible and if Matt [Cameron] isn’t around I will use a local drummer friend of mine to help me get an idea down. So I’ll bring fully realized demos to the equation and then it all kind of changes from there because everybody kind of goes, ‘Well why don’t you take out this part or put this in here or move this over here or do half of that?’ Stone [Gossard] and Jeff [Ament] are great editors so once you have your demo you bring it in and people scrutinize it and they either like it or they don’t. If they do then I just go, ‘Dude, if you have any ideas, just go for it.’ I also want to be able to add to people’s songs in the way that I do and I think I’m kind of the coloring on top of a lot of ideas and melodies at times. I feel like if Ed [Vedder] brings in a song, I want to be able to do a solo that’s cool for it. He may not have any ideas for what that is yet until I do it right there on the spot. Sometimes Jeff will bring in a couple of riffs and we’ll just jam on that. Matt will bring in parts of stuff. That being said, everyone brings in fully realized demos, too. It’s like everything; we have a lot of stuff. We don’t have any outside songwriters. [Laughs.]”