Natalie Maines (Dixie Chicks) - Without You (Eddie Vedder Cover)

Natalie Maines (Dixie Chicks) - Without You (Eddie Vedder Cover)

Her solo Album out on 7 May - Mother

PEARL JAM demos titles for new album

Pearl Jam Demos:
Mercury (Ed on vocals)
Believed In (Ed on vocals)
3, 2, 1 (Jeff? on vocals)
The Gift (Matt? on vocals)
Jumbled
Alford Pleas
Transience (Ed on vocals)

www.TheSkylScrape.com

Jeff Ament: 50 Years By The Numbers

Jeff Ament infographic madness!
50 Years By The Numbers. Read HERE

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

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.”

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.]”

Pearl Jam - Lollapalooza Brazil 31 March 2013

Lollapalooza Brazil 29-30-31 March 2010

I would like to be there!

News about next Pearl Jam Album - Jeff Ament

‎"There’s talk of us getting together in March – hopefully that’ll quickly turn into going in the studio. We have tonnes of instrumental ideas and partial songs – things that are in that in-between state. It’s just going to take us getting into a room together for a week to ten days and knocking through these arrangements to figure it all out. Hopefully by the end of that period in March we will be ready to do something. I try not to get too hung-up on what-ifs – we still need to have twelve really good songs before we can go ahead to the next step. When we got together and demoed last year it was super creative – I don’t think anybody’s sitting on their laurels."
Jeff Ament

The new immortals: PEARL JAM - RollingStone

- RollingStone - Not many bands could have survived the crushing success that Pearl Jam had on their debut album, Ten. The 1991 disc catapulted them from an unknown Seattle grunge outfit to MTV and radio gods, selling millions of records along the way and turning Eddie Vedder into an icon of his generation. Living up to that initial burst of success would have been impossible, so the band didn't even try. They stopped making videos, refused to tour with Ticketmaster, shied away from the media and did everything they could to scale back. They focused all their efforts instead on making great rock records and building one of the most devoted cult audiences in rock – and keeping their fans satisfied with marathon concerts whose set lists varied wildly from night to night. Pearl Jam might not ever land another "Jeremy" on the charts, but more than two decades after Ten, they can still instantly sell out any arena in the country.

Lollapalooza Lineup 2013

Pearl Jam: Lollapalooza Lineup 2013

Pearl Jam - 3 April - Costanera Sur

Pearl Jam - 3 April - Costanera Sur

Compilation "Pearl Jam - Touring Band Rarities 2004" Download HERE.

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.”

Spin spoke to Mike McCready and Barrett Martin

http://vimeo.com/60586756


In preparation for the deluxe, expanded re-release of the grunge supergroup's landmark debut

"I remember that we laughed a lot," says Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin, of writing Above, the lone (and beloved) 1995 release from Seattle supergroup Mad Season. "We laughed about being sober for the first time, and the newsness of that. We laughed at ourselves and a lot of the stupid things we'd done as young men."

It's a memory that stands in moving contrast to the soon-to-be-reissued full-length's relatively somber origin story: Having just left a rehab facility in Minnesota after the completion of 1994's Vitalogy, Pearl Jam lead guitarist Mike McCready approached Martin and Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley about the prospect of writing together, in hopes of helping the latter gain some distance from a battle with addiction that would haunt him until his death in 2002. Joining them on bass was late Chicago native John "Baker" Saunders, a friend and fellow rehab alum. "It was kind of a failed attempt at trying to get everybody to not be drinking or doing drugs," says McCready. "Not that you can really control that. You have to figure that out for yourself. It's been really hard to go back and listen. I miss Baker. I miss Layne. I wonder how Layne would be met these days, what kind of music he'd be making or if he'd be a father. And his lyrics [on Above] in particular still sound fresh to me. They still make me feel, and that's good."

Above, Martin adds, is the only album comprised entirely of Staley-penned lyrics, many of which were inspired by a spiritually minded, Kahlil Gibran-enriched stack of books the late vocalist carried with him from place to place in a backpack. Coupled with compositions that remain outliers for their time, the result was a delicate, blues-driven set whose recording the foursome financed themselves, just weeks after they performed for the first time at a sold-out performance at Seattle's legendary Crocodile Cafe. "It has a certain mood and a certain quality to it that no other records of that time really have," says Martin. "There's a real atmosphere to it. And when I listen to it, it just makes me happy. I'm sad about my friends being gone, but I also feel proud that we all left behind a beautiful piece of music. You can't always say that."

On April 2, the album will get a deluxe re-release in expanded form, including three songs originally meant to appear on Disinformation, a second Mad Season full-length that never came to be. And because Staley never recorded vocal takes, Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan stepped in to complete them with fresh vocals and lyrics of his own. Hear the genesis of both the reissue (which also includes a disc dedicated to the group's show at Seattle's Moore Theater on April 29, 1995) and that collaboration in the exclusive mini-doc above. You can pre-order it now on iTunes, Amazon and Pearl Jam's Ten Club store. Additionally, there will be double 12" LP of the re-issue made available for Record Store Day on April 20.