“The idea was to camp out at the Site, work the songs up and record them one at a time so, that way, we wouldn’t get too far ahead of ourselves.” “My job was to try and keep everyone feeling as creative as possible,” he recalled to Crowe. While it was typical for Nineties rock artists to record their albums in phases, finalizing the rhythm tracks for all the songs before layering other instruments and vocals on top of them, O’Brien and Pearl Jam kept the intensity intact by completing one song before moving on to the next. The band recorded the album one song at a time. It was a way to get us all together to have fun.”Ģ. Tomorrow, 9:30, pep talk in the kitchen, and then we’re going to play softball.’ We did that for quite a while. “I encouraged us to meet every morning,”O’Brien told Cameron Crowe in an interview for the Pearl Jam Twenty documentary. sessions at the Site, a residential studio in Northern California’s Marin County, O’Brien and the band loosened up for each day of recording by playing softball. So I think that my role at the time was really getting those guys in a room and getting them in a head space to record and make records.”ĭuring Vs. “They had just blown up with popularity out of nowhere. “ We all kind of hit at the same time,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013. The band played softball every day before rolling the tape.Ī talented musician in his own right, O’Brien instinctively understood that the band needed to be distracted from the immense expectations being heaped upon it by fans and the record company. In honor of the 25th anniversary of Vs., here are 10 things you might not know about the album.ġ. tops even that debut.”Įvery Awful Thing Trump Has Promised to Do in a Second Term found the band exploring new sounds and dynamics, resulting in acoustic-driven highlights like “Daughter” and “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town,” and the funkier feel of tracks such as “Rats” and “Animal.” “ Few American bands have arrived more clearly talented than this one did with Ten,” raved Paul Evans in Rolling Stone, “ and Vs. Looser, heavier and angrier than their debut, Vs. Though the recording sessions weren’t easy - personality conflicts abounded, and Vedder was particularly unhappy with the studio that had been chosen for the project - Pearl Jam emerged victorious with Vs., an album that still stands as one of the strongest records of their long and storied career. The groove shifted on the second record.” And Dave had really different strengths as a drummer than Dave Krusen. “It was a little bit like we were making our first record all over again,” bassist Jeff Ament told Rolling Stone in 2017, “because it was with a different drummer and a new producer. Making things more difficult was the fact that the band was recording for the first time with both drummer Dave Abbruzzese, who’d replaced Dave Krusen shortly before the release of Ten, and producer Brendan O’Brien. Far more remarkable, in retrospect, was that the band didn’t completely implode under pressure during the album’s recording.ĭeeply uncomfortable with the demands of stardom, yet also accused of being “sellouts” by many musicians, fans and critics from the alternative-music world (especially in the Seattle scene that spawned them), Pearl Jam were caught in a classic damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t conundrum before they’d even recorded a note of their second LP. So when Vs., released on October 19th, 1993, set an industry record by selling more than 950,000 copies in its first five days on the shelves - outperforming all other entries in that week’s Billboard Top 10 combined - it wasn’t a particularly huge surprise for anyone who’d been following Pearl Jam’s rapid rise. In the two years since the release of Ten, their 1991 debut, the band had vaulted from obscurity to the forefront of the rock mainstream on the strength of visceral singles like “Alive,” “Jeremy” and “Even Flow,” and high-intensity live performances in which frontman Eddie Vedder often risked life and limb in his quest to win over audiences. Calling Pearl Jam’s sophomore album “hotly anticipated” would have severely understated the case.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |