Ament
I Should Be Outside
एल्बम · Rock · 2021 · Ament
A week after the pandemic forced Pearl Jam to postpone their touring plans for 2020, bassist Jeff Ament and his wife found themselves at home in Montana, trying to make sense of the news in lockdown. “We had the TV and a radio on all the time, and we were just having these stressed-out conversations about everything,” he tells Apple Music. “After a while, I was totally fatigued and kind of depressed. I just said, ‘Man, we’ve got to figure something out.’”
So Ament disconnected as best he could—and every morning, he’d wake up, make some tea, and head into his home studio not knowing what he might write or record. If he got stuck, he’d take a break to paint. “I’ve done stints where I do that for six weeks or something, and maybe it's before you're going to make a record, so you're trying to bring something to the table,” he says of writing. “The difference with this is that there was no endgame to it. I was just doing it to do it, trying to make something out of nothing every day, trying not to think about the outside world too much. In the process, I came up with some stuff that's meaningful to me.”
That stuff is the 12 songs of I Should Be Outside, a deeply personal set of moody, often psychedelic rock that Ament played and recorded entirely on his own—save for percussion from former Fastbacks drummer (and RNDM bandmate) Richard Stuverud and in-demand session drummer Matt Chamberlain, who played with Pearl Jam briefly in 1991 but left before the release of Ten. Inspired in part by the creative inhibition of Neil Young, it’s an experience that forced him to push through his own limitations as a singer and multi-instrumentalist. “It really did feel like, for the first time in my life, I just didn't care if people didn't like it,” Ament says. “I didn't care if I was writing a big hit song, or if it was heavy enough, or if it was doing justice to the legacy of Pearl Jam. I don't know why it took me until I was this old to just carve out that amount of time for myself. For the last 20 years, when there's a line in a form that says ‘occupation,’ I put down ‘artist.’ And I was like, ‘Well, here's the opportunity, here's a chance to live up to the name.’” Below, Ament takes us inside a few key tracks.
“I Hear Ya”
“Politically, the last four or five years, for a lot of people, it's been hard. How do you relate to the people in your life that you love so much that you have a pretty big disagreement with? I don't think I knew what I was doing when I wrote it—it was just sort of coming out, and I was kind of making myself laugh. I don't think I've had a ton of humor in my songs, and I know everybody says that their music and their lyrics are cathartic, but it was really cathartic for me to write it. It felt like a light. I felt like I broke through something in terms of how I think about people that I have a pretty core disagreement with. Just being older and feeling like you're running out of time, you don't want to get to the end and feel like everything is black and white and everything is hate or love. If there's a life goal, at the end, I want to feel like I'm good with everybody.”
“Bandwidth”
“I had all these songs and I don't have real drums on any of them, and then I wrote 'I Hear Ya' and 'Bandwidth' one day after the other—they kind of come from the same place. I didn't know any drummer that had access to a studio, except for Matt. I didn't want to bug him because he's doing stuff for everybody and I just felt like maybe this was beneath him. But then I got desperate: One day I woke up and I had enough self-esteem that I called him up and he said, ‘I'm not doing anything this week. Send them to me.’ In one day, I had two songs finished. We got a 7-inch made of that, and I gave some to all the guys [in Pearl Jam].”
“For the Ones”
“I have a really good friend, Simon Smith, who I skateboard with once or twice a year. He made this beautiful stencil art piece of a photo that I took of my dad, standing on the ridge of where he used to have his farm, in the foothills of the Bears Paw Mountains. It's like his spot, his happy place, and it's a really joyful, pure photo of my dad. Simon just recognized that, and on the back of this piece of art he made for me, he said, 'For the ones.' I wrote a song that next day. It's about having those songs that I can just go in the other room and play and they make me feel good. It's recognizing not just our parents, but all the people in our lives that made such huge contributions to make us who we are.”
So Ament disconnected as best he could—and every morning, he’d wake up, make some tea, and head into his home studio not knowing what he might write or record. If he got stuck, he’d take a break to paint. “I’ve done stints where I do that for six weeks or something, and maybe it's before you're going to make a record, so you're trying to bring something to the table,” he says of writing. “The difference with this is that there was no endgame to it. I was just doing it to do it, trying to make something out of nothing every day, trying not to think about the outside world too much. In the process, I came up with some stuff that's meaningful to me.”
That stuff is the 12 songs of I Should Be Outside, a deeply personal set of moody, often psychedelic rock that Ament played and recorded entirely on his own—save for percussion from former Fastbacks drummer (and RNDM bandmate) Richard Stuverud and in-demand session drummer Matt Chamberlain, who played with Pearl Jam briefly in 1991 but left before the release of Ten. Inspired in part by the creative inhibition of Neil Young, it’s an experience that forced him to push through his own limitations as a singer and multi-instrumentalist. “It really did feel like, for the first time in my life, I just didn't care if people didn't like it,” Ament says. “I didn't care if I was writing a big hit song, or if it was heavy enough, or if it was doing justice to the legacy of Pearl Jam. I don't know why it took me until I was this old to just carve out that amount of time for myself. For the last 20 years, when there's a line in a form that says ‘occupation,’ I put down ‘artist.’ And I was like, ‘Well, here's the opportunity, here's a chance to live up to the name.’” Below, Ament takes us inside a few key tracks.
“I Hear Ya”
“Politically, the last four or five years, for a lot of people, it's been hard. How do you relate to the people in your life that you love so much that you have a pretty big disagreement with? I don't think I knew what I was doing when I wrote it—it was just sort of coming out, and I was kind of making myself laugh. I don't think I've had a ton of humor in my songs, and I know everybody says that their music and their lyrics are cathartic, but it was really cathartic for me to write it. It felt like a light. I felt like I broke through something in terms of how I think about people that I have a pretty core disagreement with. Just being older and feeling like you're running out of time, you don't want to get to the end and feel like everything is black and white and everything is hate or love. If there's a life goal, at the end, I want to feel like I'm good with everybody.”
“Bandwidth”
“I had all these songs and I don't have real drums on any of them, and then I wrote 'I Hear Ya' and 'Bandwidth' one day after the other—they kind of come from the same place. I didn't know any drummer that had access to a studio, except for Matt. I didn't want to bug him because he's doing stuff for everybody and I just felt like maybe this was beneath him. But then I got desperate: One day I woke up and I had enough self-esteem that I called him up and he said, ‘I'm not doing anything this week. Send them to me.’ In one day, I had two songs finished. We got a 7-inch made of that, and I gave some to all the guys [in Pearl Jam].”
“For the Ones”
“I have a really good friend, Simon Smith, who I skateboard with once or twice a year. He made this beautiful stencil art piece of a photo that I took of my dad, standing on the ridge of where he used to have his farm, in the foothills of the Bears Paw Mountains. It's like his spot, his happy place, and it's a really joyful, pure photo of my dad. Simon just recognized that, and on the back of this piece of art he made for me, he said, 'For the ones.' I wrote a song that next day. It's about having those songs that I can just go in the other room and play and they make me feel good. It's recognizing not just our parents, but all the people in our lives that made such huge contributions to make us who we are.”
I Should Be Outside
Ament
A week after the pandemic forced Pearl Jam to postpone their touring plans for 2020, bassist Jeff Ament and his wife found themselves at home in Montana, trying to make sense of the news in lockdown. “We had the TV and a radio on all the time, and we were just having these stressed-out conversations about everything,” he tells Apple Music. “After a while, I was totally fatigued and kind of depressed. I just said, ‘Man, we’ve got to figure something out.’”
So Ament disconnected as best he could—and every morning, he’d wake up, make some tea, and head into his home studio not knowing what he might write or record. If he got stuck, he’d take a break to paint. “I’ve done stints where I do that for six weeks or something, and maybe it's before you're going to make a record, so you're trying to bring something to the table,” he says of writing. “The difference with this is that there was no endgame to it. I was just doing it to do it, trying to make something out of nothing every day, trying not to think about the outside world too much. In the process, I came up with some stuff that's meaningful to me.”
That stuff is the 12 songs of I Should Be Outside, a deeply personal set of moody, often psychedelic rock that Ament played and recorded entirely on his own—save for percussion from former Fastbacks drummer (and RNDM bandmate) Richard Stuverud and in-demand session drummer Matt Chamberlain, who played with Pearl Jam briefly in 1991 but left before the release of Ten. Inspired in part by the creative inhibition of Neil Young, it’s an experience that forced him to push through his own limitations as a singer and multi-instrumentalist. “It really did feel like, for the first time in my life, I just didn't care if people didn't like it,” Ament says. “I didn't care if I was writing a big hit song, or if it was heavy enough, or if it was doing justice to the legacy of Pearl Jam. I don't know why it took me until I was this old to just carve out that amount of time for myself. For the last 20 years, when there's a line in a form that says ‘occupation,’ I put down ‘artist.’ And I was like, ‘Well, here's the opportunity, here's a chance to live up to the name.’” Below, Ament takes us inside a few key tracks.
“I Hear Ya”
“Politically, the last four or five years, for a lot of people, it's been hard. How do you relate to the people in your life that you love so much that you have a pretty big disagreement with? I don't think I knew what I was doing when I wrote it—it was just sort of coming out, and I was kind of making myself laugh. I don't think I've had a ton of humor in my songs, and I know everybody says that their music and their lyrics are cathartic, but it was really cathartic for me to write it. It felt like a light. I felt like I broke through something in terms of how I think about people that I have a pretty core disagreement with. Just being older and feeling like you're running out of time, you don't want to get to the end and feel like everything is black and white and everything is hate or love. If there's a life goal, at the end, I want to feel like I'm good with everybody.”
“Bandwidth”
“I had all these songs and I don't have real drums on any of them, and then I wrote 'I Hear Ya' and 'Bandwidth' one day after the other—they kind of come from the same place. I didn't know any drummer that had access to a studio, except for Matt. I didn't want to bug him because he's doing stuff for everybody and I just felt like maybe this was beneath him. But then I got desperate: One day I woke up and I had enough self-esteem that I called him up and he said, ‘I'm not doing anything this week. Send them to me.’ In one day, I had two songs finished. We got a 7-inch made of that, and I gave some to all the guys [in Pearl Jam].”
“For the Ones”
“I have a really good friend, Simon Smith, who I skateboard with once or twice a year. He made this beautiful stencil art piece of a photo that I took of my dad, standing on the ridge of where he used to have his farm, in the foothills of the Bears Paw Mountains. It's like his spot, his happy place, and it's a really joyful, pure photo of my dad. Simon just recognized that, and on the back of this piece of art he made for me, he said, 'For the ones.' I wrote a song that next day. It's about having those songs that I can just go in the other room and play and they make me feel good. It's recognizing not just our parents, but all the people in our lives that made such huge contributions to make us who we are.”
So Ament disconnected as best he could—and every morning, he’d wake up, make some tea, and head into his home studio not knowing what he might write or record. If he got stuck, he’d take a break to paint. “I’ve done stints where I do that for six weeks or something, and maybe it's before you're going to make a record, so you're trying to bring something to the table,” he says of writing. “The difference with this is that there was no endgame to it. I was just doing it to do it, trying to make something out of nothing every day, trying not to think about the outside world too much. In the process, I came up with some stuff that's meaningful to me.”
That stuff is the 12 songs of I Should Be Outside, a deeply personal set of moody, often psychedelic rock that Ament played and recorded entirely on his own—save for percussion from former Fastbacks drummer (and RNDM bandmate) Richard Stuverud and in-demand session drummer Matt Chamberlain, who played with Pearl Jam briefly in 1991 but left before the release of Ten. Inspired in part by the creative inhibition of Neil Young, it’s an experience that forced him to push through his own limitations as a singer and multi-instrumentalist. “It really did feel like, for the first time in my life, I just didn't care if people didn't like it,” Ament says. “I didn't care if I was writing a big hit song, or if it was heavy enough, or if it was doing justice to the legacy of Pearl Jam. I don't know why it took me until I was this old to just carve out that amount of time for myself. For the last 20 years, when there's a line in a form that says ‘occupation,’ I put down ‘artist.’ And I was like, ‘Well, here's the opportunity, here's a chance to live up to the name.’” Below, Ament takes us inside a few key tracks.
“I Hear Ya”
“Politically, the last four or five years, for a lot of people, it's been hard. How do you relate to the people in your life that you love so much that you have a pretty big disagreement with? I don't think I knew what I was doing when I wrote it—it was just sort of coming out, and I was kind of making myself laugh. I don't think I've had a ton of humor in my songs, and I know everybody says that their music and their lyrics are cathartic, but it was really cathartic for me to write it. It felt like a light. I felt like I broke through something in terms of how I think about people that I have a pretty core disagreement with. Just being older and feeling like you're running out of time, you don't want to get to the end and feel like everything is black and white and everything is hate or love. If there's a life goal, at the end, I want to feel like I'm good with everybody.”
“Bandwidth”
“I had all these songs and I don't have real drums on any of them, and then I wrote 'I Hear Ya' and 'Bandwidth' one day after the other—they kind of come from the same place. I didn't know any drummer that had access to a studio, except for Matt. I didn't want to bug him because he's doing stuff for everybody and I just felt like maybe this was beneath him. But then I got desperate: One day I woke up and I had enough self-esteem that I called him up and he said, ‘I'm not doing anything this week. Send them to me.’ In one day, I had two songs finished. We got a 7-inch made of that, and I gave some to all the guys [in Pearl Jam].”
“For the Ones”
“I have a really good friend, Simon Smith, who I skateboard with once or twice a year. He made this beautiful stencil art piece of a photo that I took of my dad, standing on the ridge of where he used to have his farm, in the foothills of the Bears Paw Mountains. It's like his spot, his happy place, and it's a really joyful, pure photo of my dad. Simon just recognized that, and on the back of this piece of art he made for me, he said, 'For the ones.' I wrote a song that next day. It's about having those songs that I can just go in the other room and play and they make me feel good. It's recognizing not just our parents, but all the people in our lives that made such huge contributions to make us who we are.”
