Both with and without Pearl Jam, Jeff has penned some deeply personal songs in his time, but we have perhaps never had such an intimate a look at his life as this project. When K! reaches him in Montana, fires are raging over the western part of the state and Canada.
“It’s real smoky here right now which kind of sucks,” he says, “but yeah, that’s the planet we live on right now.”
The blur of committing to a song and painting a day now over, soon he’ll reconvene with Pearl Jam as they prepare for their first post-pandemic live dates, the group rehearsing between 50-60 songs right now. In theory.
“I haven’t started yet,” he laughs. “Which I desperately need to!”
Before he hits the road again, however, it’s time to dive deep into the music and art that have shaped Jeff’s life lately…
You’ve been sharing various paintings on Instagram and connecting them to your new material. Are there any songs on this record that flat-out wouldn’t exist without a corresponding painting? Or vice versa?
“The song Despite All Odds. I had a childhood friend pass away a month into the pandemic. As a child, he had multiple heart surgeries – I remember hearing that it was 50/50 as to whether he would make it through, it was that heavy of a surgery. He weathered all these things as a young kid, and he played on the varsity basketball team, and was part of our crew and we were friends until the end. I woke up one morning and just started trying to do a portrait of him, or what I remembered of him as being as a kid. I don’t paint from pictures, I try to paint from memory. That afternoon, I went in the studio and just started writing down this little thing like, ‘Despite all odds, you’re one of us.’ I started singing it over this little drum loop and then it just caught fire and became a song. There’s a few tracks on here that are almost like meditations, it’s a way for you to process your grief. You can’t go to the funeral, you can’t be with his family, so you write a song and try to hit some part of the vein of your grief and move through it.”
You previously told K! how, over the years, you had to really grow in confidence when it came to writing lyrics. Is it harder – or more nerve-wracking – to put your emotions and feelings out there in a song or a painting?
“I didn’t intend to have my paintings be a part of this project, but it’s inspired my songwriting so much, just in terms of taking chances, and throwing technique out the window and trying to do something new. That’s the buzz. I feel like I’m maybe halfway through the 10,000 hours of painting [the duration said to be required to achieve mastery of an art form], and I don’t feel like I’m there yet. There’s a part of me that just didn’t want the paintings to be out there, but when I was trying to come up with artwork for the record, I just kept going, ‘These things are so connected.’ I would have been faking it if something else was the visual for the songs; it would have been a lie.”