Eddie Vedder claims Pearl Jam only has “one or two” records left to make
As Pearl Jam prepares to release their latest album Dark Matter, frontman Eddie Vedder has claimed that the band may be approaching the beginning of the end of their recording career. This will mark the band’s 12th studio album following the release of their 2020 record Gigaton.
Vedder made the announcement in MOJO Magazine, claiming that it was a matter of the band’s health, saying, “It makes you realise you gotta be healthy. You want to be around for your kids. You want to make good records, and we might have one or two left.”
The frontman also cited his contemporaries who could not be around to make more records, explaining, “You lean on the relationships with the people who are still around. It really hits you when you are in a situation where that person would be there. And you’re sad for them that they’re not.”
Of course, this is not the first time that Pearl Jam have confronted the death of a former friend. Before the group had begun, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament had started in the Seattle rock band Mother Love Bone, which Andy Wood fronted before he passed away of a drug overdose in 1990.
While Vedder has been steering Pearl Jam through the last few years, he has also become the only member of the ‘Big 4’ frontmen of grunge still standing. Following Kurt Cobain’s passing in 1994 and Layne Staley of Alice in Chains dying of an overdose in 2002, and Soundgarden frontman and longtime friend Chris Cornell was found dead in his hotel in 2017.
Considering all of the people that have passed before him, Vedder had said that the desire to step away came from wanting to live in the moment. He would go on to explain that most of them have only so much time and that it is better to live in the present.
That doesn’t mean that Vedder isn’t open to working on new music in the future. Despite his claim of having fewer albums, he did admit that making new music is still his primary goal for the band going forward.
