PEARLS of WISDOM
As Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament awoke on New Year’s Day, 2020, he knew that in a few short months, his band would release Gigaton—their hotly-anticipated eleventh album, and the veteran rock quintet’s first clutch of new material since 2013. Sprawling tours of North America and Europe would follow. For Jeff and his bandmates—vocalist Eddie Vedder, guitarists Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, and drummer Matt Cameron—this was shaping up to be their busiest and most important year in quite some time.
And yet on this warm July day, we find him relaxing with a cup of tea in the cosy confines of his Montana home, half a world away from the stages of Europe. The Pearl Jam tours, of course, are casualties of the current global pandemic.
Recalling those chaotic days in early March, Pearl Jam were in the final push before their tour was to kick off in Toronto on March 18. As headlines grew progressively darker, the band faced some hard decisions. “We’d spent about two and a half weeks doing tour rehearsals,” Ament says, “and we were going to have a week off, mainly to get the gear to the East Coast. Everybody was trying to find out what was going on, because we weren’t getting information from the epidemiologists at that point. We had three or four days of tough conversations. Going to Toronto and having fans from over 10 different countries show up at the
