Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament revealed that he channeled all the energy he was banking for Pearl Jam's scrapped tour dates for his recently released EP, American Death Squad. Ament explained to Billboard, “As I've gotten older, you have to do a bit of training leading up and do like a tour season, and so there's a lot of energy going into rehearsals and working out and just getting mentally ready to leave your household, and so I felt like when we pulled the plug on it, I felt like I had all this energy.”
He went on to recall, “That first week, just all the anxiety of watching the news and stuff, my wife and I were just saying, 'We got to pivot this into something positive. We only have so much life left, so let's just figure out a way to do some things that we've always wanted to do.'”
Ament explained how he repurposed his performing energy: “I just started waking up early in the morning and going in the studio, and then it turned into, 'Okay, I'm going to try to write a song every day. I'm going to try to finish it. I'm going to lay drums down. I'm going to get the instrumentation, figure out the arrangement, write lyrics, and do a rough mix. After about a week, it sort of felt like I got into this really great groove with it, and then it lasted like two months. I just kept writing, kept writing, kept writing. These were some of the first songs that came out of that bunch, and they were probably some most anxious of the songs, so.”
Jeff Ament, who's been a recording artist for over half his life, told us that the Pearl Jam's initial goals when they started out were decidedly modest: “Y'know, I think we all thought, like, if we sold 50, 60,000 records, that would allow us to make a new record and, y'know, I think mostly we wanted to get out and play. Y'know, I think we wanted to be a touring band and we wanted to be better musicians and we wanted to be more powerful and tighter. And we knew in that process we'd be better songwriters, and so I think for us, y'know, at the time the focus was just to be a better band.”
