It's a long interview that spans O'Brien's career with Pearl Jam, so I won't steal all your steam in reading it, but here's a great excerpt about the new album.
How does the sound of this record compare to the previous one?
I'm terrible at stuff like that. The way I've always kind of recorded records and made records is that we shut up and the songs dictate how it's going to sound. We don't really think about it that much. There's not a lot of pretense about it. So I don't know that they sound that much . . . we kind of recorded in the same fashion.
But I guess there are a few longer, more devoted songs. On Backspacer I really love that all the songs were fairly short. I love that about it. They were all "get in, get out fast." This record has a few songs that have a bit more of a . . . they kind of . . . what's the word I'm looking for here? They're longer. [Laughs] I don't know if the word "depth" is right, but some of the songs kind of take you down a road for a while.
There's a song called "Siren" that I think is one of the best songs on the record. That clocks in around five minutes, which is long pop song. It really works out. A song called "Infallible" – at least that's what I believe it's called – is also a little more developed that way.
I'll leave it to the guys in the band to describe what the songs are about and that kind of stuff. But as far as sonically, the way it sounds different, I don't know. You'll have to tell me.
