Pearl Jam - Touring Band Rarities 2003 V.III

Pearl Jam - Touring Band Rarities 2003 V. III - You can download it Here.

Mike McCready & Star Anna - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Mike McCready and Star Anna's full performance live on Kexp

Star Anna - Live Round

Star Anna: This is gonna be good stuff! Go to it! MARCH 12th!

Mike McCready discusses about Layne Staley and John Baker Saunders

Here are a couple of excerpts from PremierGuitar.com‘s new interview with former Mad Season guitarist Mike McCready:

On the difficulty he felt when listening back to the Mad Season album featuring his fallen bandmates Layne Staley and John Baker Saunders: “Tons. I hadn’t listened to that record for 10 or 12 years. I’d listen to it if it was on the radio and I’d feel happy but sad, I don’t know if that makes sense. I’d feel like, I’m proud of this song but I’m also very sad that my friends are not around anymore. So getting over that and listening to the record again and listening to some of the live stuff, is kind of bittersweet. It makes me sad that Layne and Baker are not around to experience life now as an older guy. My values now are different than what they were when I was 26 and I think about what those guys would have been like if they were still around. It’s hard.”

On Mad Season’s formation: “When we got together in 1994 the initial idea of it from my point of view…I was in rehab for booze and I met this guy Baker [John Baker Saunders] in there who played bass and I liked a lot. He was just this funny, crusty old blues player who had some pretty cool stories and was cranking Bob Dylan in his room; I just immediately liked him. So I said, ‘Do you wanna play some blues sometime or come back to Seattle and jam?’ My thought process back then was to help people who were suffering from addictions or alcohol to maybe do a project. That was where my heart was at the time, however naïve it was. That’s kind of where the initial idea for Mad Season came from.”

Walking Papers - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

NEW PRESS RELEASE: Walking Papers have confirmed their first ever dates in The Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, and Scotland. "Walking Papers are very pleased to be returning to Europe twice this spring and summer, as we play our first ever shows in Holland, Germany, Ireland, and Scotland, as well as returning to France and England, where we debuted the band last November. We are also excited to be appearing at England's Download Festival on June 14th & 15th and Estonia's Summer Rock Festival on June 16th. Again the line up will be myself on drums, Jeff Angell on guitar and vocals, Duff McKagan on bass, and Ben Anderson on keys. We even have some brand new songs to play, from our forthcoming second album." - Barrett Martin

The 13 shows starting on April 27th in Tilburg, Netherlands are in support of their brilliant self titled debut album. Walking Papers show that a great song can be conveyed through percolating marimbas, vibraphone, piano, and trumpet, just as easily as it can with thundering drums, bass, and a howling guitar. The songs on this album stand alone as individual stories, but taken together as a whole they tell a much larger narrative that conveys the tales of wandering souls, the collisions of will, and the dark beauty of the American heart. There is also a guest appearance from Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready on two of the album's tracks. 

Walking Papers debut album has been hailed as: 

"A masterpiece of mood and tension." - Classic Rock 
"If Mick, Keith, and Tom Waits went down to the early Zeppelin rehearsals and sat in a few songs." - The Stranger
"If they are as good live as they sound on the album then their shows will be phenomenal." - With Guitars 
"Compelling." - Kerrang 
"The coolest band in the world right now." - Scott Rowley Editor In Chief, Classic Rock Magazine 

European Tour Dates:

April 27th - Tilburg, Netherlands @ 013
April 28th - Amsterdam, Netherlands @ The Winston
April 29th - Hamburg, Germany @ Logo 
May 1st - Cologne, Germany @ The Underground
May 2nd - Saarbrucken, Germany @ The Garage 
May 3rd - Paris, France @ La Fleche d'Or 
May 4th - London, England @ The Garage London
June 11th - Dublin, Ireland @ The Pint
June 12th - Belfast, Northern Ireland @ Voodoo
June 13th - Glasgow, Scotland @ Stereo
June 14th - England @ Download Festival (acoustic set) 
June 15th - England @ Download Festival (regular set) 
June 16th - Tallinn, Estonia @ Rock Summer Festival 

Mike McCready, Duff McKagan, and Barrett Martin in new unnammed band

Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready, Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan, and Barrett Martin have put together a new band that has yet to be named. The trio is still seeking out a vocalist as well. McCready describes how the band came together:

“Duff and Barrett and I got together. We wrote some new stuff and we took some of those old Mad Season demos from that [unreleased] second Disinformation record, so we are trying to find something to do with those,” McCready said. “We’re talking to Jaz [Coleman] from Killing Joke and I’ve been trying to find some singers to work on some of that stuff.”

“I had a whole bunch of song ideas and Mike had a whole bunch of song ideas and Duff had a whole bunch of song ideas that were not making it into Walking Papers,” Martin adds. “We decided that we would go into the studio and record them. Right now they’re being sent out to different singers. Mike and Duff are overseeing that because they know everybody.”

The new band has no secure dates for any upcoming releases, but Martin notes it will depend on McCready’s schedule with Pearl Jam.

Mike McCready & Barret Martin reveal the original plans for Mad Season’s second Album ‘Disinformation’

In a new interview with Billboard, Mike McCready and Barrett Martin discussed the original plan for Mad Season’s second album Disinformation. They said that they began work on the album in 1996 but Layne Staley and John Baker Saunders became increasingly difficult to get ahold of.

McCready discussed one of the new songs on the reissue, “‘Slip Away,’ which I wrote, was kind of my feeling at the time how [Mad Season] was slipping away,” McCready says. “The guitar solo at the end of that, you can hear the pain that’s in that. That’s my pain of how this whole thing was all falling apart when Baker and Layne were dying… Mark put lyrics to that and they mean something different now… but I’m getting a little deep in to what the lead is. You’ll listen to it and you’ll hear pain.”

McCready also discussed getting Mark Lanegan involved with the process, “The original plan when we were working on that second record was that Mark was going to be much more involved in co-writing songs and this is what Layne wanted,” Martin says. When the reissue idea surfaced, “we sent him all 17 basic tracks… I said, ‘here’s what we have, is there anything on there you felt compelled to write some lyrics and sing on. And he picked three! More than we expected.”

Barrett Martin said, “I don’t want to speak for Mark, because they’re his words, but it’s his tribute to Layne and Baker. He knew those guys very well. He was one of Layne’s best friends.”