Pearl Jam will finally return to the road this fall for a series of festival shows, marking the band’s first full live performances since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. They shows also will be the grunge icons’ first concerts since they released their new album Gigaton in March 2020.
“We have a lot of work ahead of us,” bassist Jeff Ament tells Spin. “We’ve never played the Gigaton songs live yet.”
Ament then explains, “We’ll need a solid week [of six focused hours per day] with just that. Some of the technical stuff, like me playing keyboard on ‘Dance of the Clairvoyants,’ will be set so we won’t have to figure out what we have to do.”
Being sidelined by the pandemic also means that the upcoming shows will be Pearl Jam’s first since 2018.
“The rest of the catalog we haven’t played in three years,” Ament says. “There’s the physical thing where your hands just know where to go with a lot of the songs and I think the earlier tunes, like ‘Even Flow’ and ‘Corduroy,’ will be easy. But if we decide to play like a ‘Swallowed Whole,’ or ‘Infallible’ or even ‘Pendulum’ — any of those kinds of songs, we’re gonna have to work.”
PJ’s fall schedule includes sets at the Sea.Hear.Now Festival in Asbury Park, New Jersey, as well as three performances at frontman Eddie Vedder‘s Ohana Festival.
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