I Should Be Outside

A week after the pandemic forced Pearl Jam to postpone their touring plans for 2020, bassist Jeff Ament and his wife found themselves at home in Montana, trying to make sense of the news in lockdown. “We had the TV and a radio on all the time, and we were just having these stressed-out conversations about everything,” he tells Apple Music. “After a while, I was totally fatigued and kind of depressed. I just said, ‘Man, we’ve got to figure something out.’” So Ament disconnected as best he could—and every morning, he’d wake up, make some tea and head into his home studio not knowing what he might write or record. If he got stuck, he’d take a break to paint. “I’ve done stints where I do that for six weeks or something, and maybe it's before you're going to make a record, so you're trying to bring something to the table,” he says of writing. “The difference with this is that there was no endgame to it. I was just doing it to do it, trying to make something out of nothing every day, trying not to think about the outside world too much. In the process, I came up with some stuff that's meaningful to me.” That stuff is the 12 songs of I Should Be Outside, a deeply personal set of moody, often psychedelic rock that Ament played and recorded entirely on his own—save for percussion from former Fastbacks drummer (and RNDM bandmate) Richard Stuverud and in-demand session drummer Matt Chamberlain, who played with Pearl Jam briefly in 1991 but left before the release of Ten. Inspired in part by the creative inhibition of Neil Young, it’s an experience that forced him to push through his own limitations as a singer and multi-instrumentalist. “It really did feel like, for the first time in my life, I just didn't care if people didn't like it,” Ament says. “I didn't care if I was writing a big hit song, or if it was heavy enough, or if it was doing justice to the legacy of Pearl Jam. I don't know why it took me until I was this old to just carve out that amount of time for myself.