Pearl Jam Presses Ahead After Matt Cameron Departure
Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready and Eddie Vedder at Madison Square Garden on Sept. 11, 2022 (photo: Kevin Mazur / Getty Images for Pearl Jam).
Pearl Jam has largely been mum about its future since the surprise July 2025 departure of Matt Cameron after 27 years in the band, although frontman Eddie Vedder said in a recent interview promoting his Netflix documentary Matter of Time that he and remaining original members guitarist Stone Gossard, guitarist Mike McCready and bassist Jeff Ament have been “woodshedding.”
For fans unfamiliar with the term, McCready offered his take on Pearl Jam’s next steps in an interview with SPIN. “‘Woodshedding’ is us thinking about it and talking about what it could be,” he said. “I think that’s what Ed was referring to. We’ve been emailing a lot, talking and calling each other. The way we work, as you know, is that we can be very slow and then all of a sudden we’re very fast. So, we’re kind of in our slow phase. It’s going to happen, but I just don’t know when. I would also love to go out and tour this year sometime, but we don’t have anything planned.”
McCready waxed poetic about sharing the stage for nearly three decades with Cameron, who joined Pearl Jam for its summer 1998 Yield tour after both his departure from longtime band Soundgarden and prior Pearl Jam drummer Jack Irons’ sudden resignation just two months prior.
“All of us felt that playing with Matt Cameron was a dream come true,” McCready said. “He’s such a solid force, and we were so lucky to get him when we needed him. Of course, I always worshiped him as a drummer and got to know him and love him as a human being and his whole family. I mean, I’ve known his wife, April, since we were in high school together. I always felt the band was going to be better every year because he was a member. That’s the way I looked at it. I’m looking forward to the future and whatever that may be, but I love Matt and I want him to pursue whatever he wants to pursue and be successful at it. I wish him the best on his journeys.”
Andrew Watt and Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready at London’s Hyde Park in 2022 (photo: Danny Clinch)
Cameron’s final album with Pearl Jam was 2024’s Dark Matter, which was produced by Grammy-winning super-fan Andrew Watt. “He was very adamant about me doing a lot of leads, which I don’t have any problem with,” McCready says with a laugh. “That part of it was super fun. Andrew’s energy was infectious and very exciting to be around. He’s younger than us. He was a fan of our band for a long time and I think we’re his favorite band. He would pull out excitement from us that maybe we had forgotten. He’s jumping up and down and running around and doing all this stuff, but at the same time, he’s great at getting sounds and coming up with songwriting ideas. He energized us to step up and play as good as we can. The process went by very fast and was very efficient. That helped us be able to jump right into it with him. We’re very insular and it’s hard for us to let other people in, but we trusted him enough to let him in. In my mind, that record is so great because of his influence on it.”
McCready pointed to the album’s title track as a prime example of how Watt encouraged the band to write quickly and preserve the first sparks of inspiration for a given song or idea. “Speaking of Matt Cameron, that song came out of a Matt Cameron drum pattern,” he recalled. “He was just warming up and Stone was like, that sounds really cool. Put that on a loop. Stone came back with something the next day, Jeff had an idea and bam, I had a bridge that actually came to me in a dream. It was done in a couple of days. It’s a cliche, but Andrew captured lightning in a bottle.”
“You don’t want to overdo something, except for ‘Even Flow,’ which we did 50 times,” he chuckled. “If I do a lead six times, the first two are almost always the best. The solo on ‘Dark Matter’ was the first take. When that happens, you know you’ve got something good going on. You don’t have to overanalyze it.”
As previously reported, McCready has spent his recent downtime completing work on his graphic novel and companion album Farewell to Seasons, a fictionalized take on the Seattle music scene that will be released Oct. 6 by Z2. Asked about his musical inspirations during the process, he said, “I wish I had something profound and interesting to say about the new, fantastic music that I’m listening to, but I get stuck listening to old stuff all the time. I’m back deep into David Bowie right now as I’ve been working on the rock opera and graphic novel — primarily the Ziggy Stardust era, the whole concept behind it and why he wrote it. I’ve tried to get into that mindset. It’s like a library of information where you can also love the songs. I love Ashes to Ashes and Young Americans too, but I’m sticking with Mick Ronson and Ziggy as the high-water mark.”
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