Pearl Jam is either album number eight or 188 from Eddie Vedder and Co., depending on whether you include official bootlegs (there’s 176 of them), live records (two), best-ofs (one) and odds ‘n’ sods collections (one). Either way, the 13-track LP is easily the Seattle quintet’s best studio effort since 1998’s Yield and a welcome return-to-form following 2002’s awkward Riot Act. Pearl Jam left longtime label Epic in 2003 and signed to J Records, the imprint run by 74-year-old music impresario Clive Davis. (The band’s new labelmates include Barry Manilow, Kenny G and Whitney Houston.) For a group as self-sufficient as Pearl Jam, something as cosmetic as changing record labels has zero effect on its musical output. Nonetheless, a change in scenery seems to have re-energized the band. While Pearl Jam finds Vedder once again raging against the machine (he has made no secret of his opinion of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq), this time out, his anger is focused and perfectly suited to these mostly hard-rocking songs that address the current state of the Union.

The 41-year-old Vedder spoke to MAGNET from Pearl Jam’s Seattle warehouse space.

Thanks for interviewing Sleater-Kinney for MAGNET last year.
Thanks for the opportunity to get the girls over to the house. It was a pleasure.

You said that listening to their last record broke the speakers of your car. Did you get that problem fixed?
I put the CD on in the house; it seemed to break the speakers there. Turns out it was the CD itself. No speakers—car or house—could handle the power of the record.

When you interviewed Sleater-Kinney in issue #67, you said being on Sub Pop Records is an unfulfilled dream of yours. I thought that after Pearl Jam left Epic, you would go the indie route and put out your own records. But you signed to J, which is owned by the same company as Epic.
They weren’t owned by the same company when we started talking to them. It just turned into this sort of ironic situation. To be honest, I think talking about labels—except for exciting labels like Sub Pop or Epitaph or Kill Rock Stars—is completely boring. It just came down to something like distribution. Everything else we do in house, anyway. It’s just a matter of how to get the songs into people’s hands so they can get it into their ears. That—and not being represented in a way that we find offensive—is what is comes down to for us.

Did you talk about doing it yourselves?
Because of the scale of things, it really starts to interfere with things that are ultimately more important, like the records. Based on that, we realized that we probably don’t have the brain space to encompass both making the music and distributing the music. You’d think it would be easier on a bigger scale, but it isn’t really. We tried to find somebody who’ll allow us to be who we are and respects how we do things. And then we can do them. We’re still growing as a band: That’s our main objective. The people I respect the most release their records themselves, like the Dischord model. It takes all we’ve got to just do the music. And I don’t mean it to be a cop out; it’s something that we’ve learned and have to accept. I think Epitaph was the one label we were really excited about. We had a number of talks with Brett (Gurewitz, Epitaph owner). We were friends before and are still friends now. That would’ve been the most exciting option. But I think it really came down to the facilitation of getting the music out there. It might have even come down to something like foreign publishing. See, I told you it was going to get boring. [Laughs]

Do all five of you have to be in agreement for something to get done?
Yeah. That’s why it takes a little bit of time. It’s easy to do if it’s a decision outside of music; it’s the music and arrangement stuff—that’s when it’s harder to get the majority. You have to be sensitive to people’s artistic outpouring. It’s much easier to decide whether we want to play Cincinnati or not than how long should the bridge go. That’s when it gets touchy.

What do you think is a better situation for a band: one where every member has the same say or one where one person is the leader/dictator?
It’s probably an easier situation to go with the dictator, but I think the music suffers. You’re in a band where one guy is doing all the work and the others are kind of being enabled to be in a rock band but don’t really have to do much. I don’t think James Iha wanted to just show up and play the parts he was told to. He’s too talented to rest in peace in that situation. His playing demanded a certain kind of respect, and I don’t think he got it. Our new record is such a good example. It certainly wasn’t the easiest road, but I think the best music came out of it.

On the new album, three of the songs were written solely by you. The remaining ones were written by six different pairings of band members, a way you guys have worked at least since (1996’s) No Code. I can’t think of another band that has had that kind of continual variety in the songwriting process.
What the group has evolved into unconsciously is like a vessel or vehicle for everyone to express themselves musically. And, in the past, lyrically; this time it was kind of left up to me to round out the lyrical content. You helped me by doing the research, but I think it’s what makes our group different and, perhaps, sustainable. Everyone has a drive to get back into the room and do it again because they know they will get to express themselves.

In the story we did on you guys when Riot Act came out, Jeff (Ament, bassist) said that in the past, it would always come down to you alone in the studio trying to finish 20 songs and that that wasn’t fair to you.
Well, this new record took a different turn as far as how it came to be. It didn’t stem from demos or songs that were prepared in any way the day we went into the studio. We really went in with nothing, which I wouldn’t recommend to anybody. It started to feel like our second or third record. There were a couple guys who hung in there until the end, but in the very end, it was still me. [Laughs] An interviewer told me that Stone (Gossard, guitarist) said, “Everyone in the band has one hand on the wheel, but Ed has always had two.” I thought about that last night: Yeah, but they had the comfort of being in the car. I was, like, on the hood, hanging on for dear life. It’s similar to early records in a lot of ways. Also, there’s a kind of madness in the lyrics; I ended up in those places of semi-insanity to get it all out. You don’t enjoy that part of the process, but it creates better stuff.

The lyrics are very dark. There are glimmers of hope but not that many.
I was hoping that the, uh, hope was going to be in the guitar solos. It was the guitars and drums going at it that was going to lift you out of the dark abyss that I had painted.

On the lyric sheet, “Gone” has “Thanks again P.T.” next to the songwriting credit. Who is P.T.?
What would be your guess?

Pete Townshend.
See, it’s easy, isn’t it? [Laughs] I wrote “Thanks again” because I realized the first time I thanked him was (Binaural’s) “Soon Forget” because I lifted a couple ukulele chords from “Blue, Red And Gray” off Who By Numbers. This time I’m thanking him because I lifted a lyric; I guess I better call him quick. [Laughs] The lyric says, “Nothing is everything”; it’s from a song called “Let’s See Action” off Who Came First. It’s an idea that came from Meher Baba, who is Pete’s spiritual leader. I think if I’m helping spread the word of Meher Baba rather than stealing Pete’s lyrics, he’ll be OK with it. It comes from Meher Baba’s quote about desire for nothing except desirelessness; I think I’m turning it around in the song by saying, “If nothing is everything, I will have it all,” meaning I’m just letting go. It’s about a guy who’s just getting the fuck out of town and starting over with nothing and wanting nothing. It was written in Atlantic City, so you can imagine. I was looking at this freeway in front of me and didn’t know which way was out of town, but I certainly knew which way I wanted to be headed.

Now that we’ve gotten some distance, how effective do you think the Vote For Change tour was, given George Bush won the election?
After it happened, you felt like you really didn’t know the people in this country, even though you just visited Ohio and all the other places that were considered swing states.

Did you notice where George Bush threw out the first pitch this year to start the baseball season? Ohio.
Is that right?

Yeah, Cincinnati.
That fucking son of a bitch.

His buddy owns the Reds, which is why he did it, I assume. But still, shouldn’t he be in Texas throwing out the first pitch?
Maybe he should be occupied with figuring out what the hell is going on with his foreign policy. Maybe he should be getting people back home to their families and stop killing Iraqi families. Maybe they should stop cutting brush and stop shooting ducks and fucking get in the fucking office and get the job done. I’m working harder as a fucking musician than any of these assholes are that are leading and representing our country to the rest of the world. They are creating a huge fucking mess.

To try to get back to your question ... [Laughs] Can you tell I’m a little bit frustrated by this situation? I would be embarrassed to go out smiling in front of a crowd of people with the world in a state of affairs as it is now, knowing that they were the ones who stepped in the hornets’ nest. It’s a level of arrogance that I imagine is unparalleled in documented American history. It’s that arrogance that made people feel safer. I think Hurricane Katrina showed us that we are not safe with this administration. In fact, while the war is going on, the rights of Americans—not to mention economic stability and job security—have been completely eroded, but it’s all buried beneath the war. If you look at the profit margins of their friends—whether it’s oil companies they have close ties to from Condoleezza Rice and, obviously, Bush himself to Halliburton and Dick Cheney—it’s unfathomable that this is going on without a level of dissent that is so loud that they can no longer speak their lies above it. I think it’s finally getting to that point. We’re finally starting to get fed up. This might be the window where you can finally get an antiwar candidate, because the polls would support him. It’s a shame that no one has the balls to say what they feel instead of saying what they know will get them elected. That’s how power ends up in the people’s hands: if they are vocal and do express themselves. Out of self-preservation alone, the politicians would have to follow. This is the kind of hope we have to have these days. Looking back, even though the Vote For Change tour was a failed experiment because our candidate did not win, it was also a flexing of the muscle of freedom of speech and preserving the rights that were written into the Constitution by some incredibly smart individuals a couple hundred years ago that say that not only do we have the right to dissent but we have the responsibility, that it’s actually our duty as citizens. That’s something kids in school are being reminded of. I was probably not listening that day, but I finally figured it out years later. It’s a very important part of living in America. In no other time in recent history has it been as intense. I think what’s happening now are things that will affect the next few generations, whether environmentally or just corporate globalization. I think it’s a radical time in America.