Producer Profile

AFTER 30 YEARS OF GRUFF AND GRUNGY WORLD DOMINATION, SEATTLE ROCKERS PEARL JAM HAVE CHOSEN TO SWITCH THINGS UP A BIT. THEIR MILESTONE 11TH ALBUM, GIGATON, EXPLORES A WORLD OF EXPERIMENTAL POST-PUNK AND ALT-ROCK THAT FANS NEVER EXPECTED FROM THE BAND AND

Defying the odds as a rock ’n’ roll unit as bright and bombastic in 2020 as they were 30 years ago, Pearl Jam have all but reinvented themselves on album #11: the equally caustic and kaleidoscopic Gigaton. To bring their ambitious new vision to life, they enlisted the help of fellow Seattleite Josh Evans, who’d first linked up with the band in the mid ‘ 00s as an engineering assistant. Though Gigaton marks his first time in the big player’s chair at the helm of production, Evans knows Pearl Jam like the back of his hand, working closely with them as a roadie, gear tech, assistant and good ol’ fashioned friend.

In addition to his work with Pearl Jam, Evans laid his magic touch on records by such acclaimed artists as Gary Clark Jr, Soundgarden and Brandie Carlile – he’s certainly no up-and-comer in the world of soulriveting rock ’n’ roll, and Gigaton is only further proof of his innately idiosyncratic talents. With Gigaton making waves as one of the best Pearl Jam records in decades – and one of 2020’s best rock albums in general – we caught up with Evans from his home studio to find out how he made it all happen.

You’ve been a part of the Pearl Jam team for a few years now, but this is the first album you fully produced with them. How did your journey with the band lead you to this point?

It’s been a bit of an unusual path. My background is as an audio engineer, and I worked as a freelance engineer in Seattle for a long while; years and years ago, when I was just getting my start, I worked at this place called Studio X where [Pearl Jam] were recording the self-titled record – the one with the avocado on the cover. At at that time, I was just an engineer, so y’know, I was getting coffee, getting sandwiches, setting up equipment, cleaning up at the end of the day… But I got to know the band a little bit through that – and more importantly, got to know some of their crew pretty well.

After that record came out, I was hired to work for the band, just doing odd jobs – y’know, it helped that I had an audio background, but if they needed somebody to paint walls or build shelves or move boxes… In the rock ’n’ roll world, I started in the mail room with these guys. But a few years later I started touring as a roadie, taking care of [keyboardist] Boom Gaspar – I had that studio background and knew a lot about MIDI, keyboards, synthesisers, all of that stuff, so I got drafted to go on the road with him.

I’d always been recording and doing other projects on the side, and for the past five or six years,

I’ve been working with a lot of the individual band members on their side-projects, or working with them in their home studios on film scores and solo records and things like that. And then around 2017, when we really started working on this record, I was kind of just the guy helping record the demos; Pearl

Jam has a little studio in their warehouse here in Seattle, and they wanted to kind of star t small and record a few little demos.

It was a really organic evolution where we just kept working on those demos, refining and adding more songs – and at some point, we all kind of realised, “Hold on… We’re not recording demos anymore, we’re making an album!” I fully expected that at some point, they’d go, “Thanks for your service, Josh, but now we’re going to bring the real producer in to take it home.” But that conversation never happened. I think they figured, “Everything’s sounding good, and everybody’s excited – let’s just keep working and see where it takes us!” And

I feel really grateful that they gave me a shot, and trusted me with finishing the process that we started together.

So when you all started working on the record, what was the vision

that you and the band had for it?

Yeah, it’s interesting – I don’t think anybody in the band necessarily had a final product in mind, or even a mood or a sound. But they definitely had some ideas about trying out a different process and working in a different way. We probably recorded these 12 songs in every kind of way you could record a song – from what you’d imagine a jam session looks like with everybody in the room and guitars on straps, amps all over the place, etcetera; to just sort of experimental things, playing around with textures and ways of assembling parts, different people coming in on different days and adding things, and different people editing…

Y’know, they had an agreement on this record that anybody could edit anything they wanted to; anybody could delete anybody else’s part if they didn’t like it, and if one of the guys came in the next day and wanted their part back, they could put it back in… There were no rules, and no ownership in a way – it was just, “Try anything.” I think they were really open to working in a different way, and once we got rolling with that – just making every song as exciting and interesting as possible – we ended up with songs that sound really different.

I was reading about how songs like “Seven O’Clock” were pieced together from different portions of jam sessions early in the recording process, then layered with new elements later on.

How many songs came together in that way, where you were all doing things loosely and on the fly as opposed to working with a rigid formula or song-building structure?

That’s a hard question to answer, because it’s like, where’s the line where something turns from an experiment, or a session of just playing around with sounds, into a song? We went in with dozens and dozens of little pieces of ideas, and these were the 12 where, at some point, they started to have a conversation with each other, and sort of asked to be put next to each other.

We utilised Pro Tools in a way where we weren’t just using it as a tape machine, but as a sort of compositional tool as well. I think Pro Tools can be used for good or for evil – you can use it to over-edit things and make things sound too perfect, but I really liked that it also lets you just hit record, y’know? There are some things, like the first solo that Stone [Gossard] plays on “Quick Escape”, which is literally just DI’d guitars. We didn’t even run it through an amp simulator. If someone had an idea, we would just plug a DI in and capture it.

You can actually use Pro Tools to keep things messy and loose, and capture some of those first ideas in their purest form. With “Seven O’Clock”, there are a lot of these ambient guitar textures popping in and out and swelling up and down, and some of those were from an initial jam session we did where we were just playing around with chords. After we had re-tracked the actual song, I could go back to that ‘demo’ and sort of mine it for cool sounds; I would listen through and create a little palate of interesting sounds that I could then glue back into the master recording.

I think there’s stuff on this record that sounds really loose and wild, that was probably edited to death. And there’s things like

Matt Cameron’s drum performance on “Dance Of The Clairvoyants”, which is more or less, start to finish, one performance – and it sounds edited and precise and computerised, even though it was a fully acoustic performance.

Having worked with some of the band members as a tech beforehand, were you able to really dial in their specific tones in the studio?

I mean, one of the great things about this record was that we made it in their warehouse, so we had every guitar, amp and pedal they own at our disposal – 30-plus years of collecting and acquiring equipment. So that was really exciting. Y’know, it’s funny – the themselves don’t have a lot of patience for sitting around with a bunch of fuzz pedals and picking out the best ones – they’re not tweakers over gear. I mean, they have great taste in gear and they have all these amazing pieces of equipment, like vintage ’59 Les Pauls and Strats from the ‘60s, tweed Fenders and all of that stuff… And they’re all great musicians, so that makes my job incredibly easy.

But especially with Mike

[McCready, lead guitar] – I might come in a couple hours before he would and play around with six different fuzz pedals, then find one and go, “Oh, this would be cool!”

And then I’d have it dialled in so that when he showed up, he could just pick up the guitar and hit the chord. They care about tones and they’re very interested in creating interesting sounds, but y’know, they don’t want to sit there and audition cables or try different picks, or think about whatever gauge strings they’re playing on – they just want to get in there and play!

WE UTILISED PRO TOOLS IN A WAY WHERE WE WEREN’T JUST USING

IT AS A TAPE MACHINE, BUT AS A SORT OF COMPOSITIONAL TOOL AS WELL