One of our favorite things about Gigaton is the way it sets itself apart from Pearl Jam's independent work, their last 3 albums. How much of that was the band? How much of that was the new producer, Josh Evans? Since Josh is, apparently, the new blood in this process, it's easy to hold him up.
We may never know for sure, but Rolling Stone Italy tried to get to the bottom of it in an interview with Josh Evans this week. We, here at Red Mosquito, are monolingual and hand to depend on Google Translate, but you can check out the interview in its entirety here.
The album [...] is the result of sessions of almost home-made recordings spread over a long period of time during which musicians have often worked on songs individually or in pairs. The collector and guarantor of these sessions is called Josh Evans, has been collaborating with Pearl Jam for fifteen years, is their trusted sound engineer and for the first time co-produces their album.Here is what we learned about how the process may be setting Gigaton apart.
The Gigaton sessions had started almost two years earlier, in January 2017. "Inside the Warehouse a small recording room has been created, the GT Studios. Nothing in particular, just the cabin for the battery, the control room. It is as if it were a home study. Some recordings were made before January 2017, the River Cross pump organ is from 2015 for example, but that was when they started getting serious. For a couple of months he worked every day. Not all together, but someone was always there. There have been breaks for the tour. And the death of Chris Cornell in May stopped everything. He was a friend and a source of inspiration for everyone. It blew us away. It took a year to recover and process the mourning." It is said that Comes Then Goes is dedicated to Cornell. "I don't know specifically. But I'm sure there's a bit of Chris in all Gigaton songs . And so it is in his texts he tries to make sense of what he lives, raising his daughters, climate change, Cornell"
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"They no longer wanted to get together in the hall, turn on the amps, play and record, even if some piece born like this is there, for example Who Ever Said that basically they are the ones who play together in the same room even if then Mike put some strange atmospheres experimenting with the E-Bow. Maybe two members of the group came to the studio and recorded a draft song. The next day, two others came and radically rearranged what had been done the day before. And on the third day someone else came and took his own. The important thing was to have an open mind and not be afraid of messing up writing and recording. The rule was: no rule. "
