"There's a reason Pearl Jam is still going strong 30 years in," states producer Josh Evans. "The guys care deeply about the details that matter and they’re determined to let go of the things that don’t."

While Evans has worked in various capacities with the legendary alt-rockers since 2006, their brand-new album Gigaton (out now on the band's own Monkeywrench Records imprint) marks the first time that the Seattle-based studio pro has been credited as a co-producer alongside the band. The feverishly anticipated record is the band’s 11th studio album overall and their first since the release of their GRAMMY-winning 2013 album Lightning Bolt. After an explosively strong trio of pre-release singles—the adventurously experimental "Dance Of The Clairvoyants," the familiarly ferocious "Superblood Wolfman" and the riff-heavy protest song "Quick Escape"—Gigaton announces a defiantly new chapter in the band's iconic multi-decade canon of bombast and breath.

Gigaton's raucous opener "Who Ever Said" finds Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder growling "Whoever said it’s all been said gave up on satisfaction" and the mantra serves as a bit of a warning to anyone who might assume the band is operating on creative cruise control. Known for continually pushing out their own artistic walls and finding previously undiscovered ways to be completely themselves, Pearl Jam has once again evaded expectations to deliver an album that is both reminiscent of their past successes and wholly relevant to the current cultural, environmental, and socio-political moment. From the climate-conscious album artwork featuring the breathtaking photography of conservationist Paul Nicklen to the unflinchingly "of the moment" lyrical directness that is usually reserved for hip-hop, punk and folk songs, Gigaton finds the band openly embracing hard-earned experience and fresh experimentation to create one of their most prescient offerings to date.         

Recently, the Recording Academy spoke with Gigaton co-producer Evans to discuss the band's multi-year journey of writing and recording the album and their renewed commitments to both boundaryless creative experimentation and uncompromising socio-political engagement.

Josh Evans: I guess you could say I kind of started in the mailroom with these guys. I first started working with them as an assistant engineer during the recording of the Avocado album, their self-titled record from 2006. At the time, the term "assistant engineer" meant setting up gear, getting sandwiches, making coffee, cleaning the toilets, or whatever else needed to be done—all of which allowed me to really get to know the band and their crew. When the album was finished, they were moving warehouses to their current location and they hired me to do stuff like moving boxes and painting walls and I ended up working around the warehouse and studio on a full-time basis.

I also started touring with them as a tech. Over the past five years or so, I started recording a lot of their demos, both for band stuff and for some of their individual solo projects. Around the beginning of 2017, they decided to really focus on crafting a new album, so we started recording demos, which turned into new songs, which eventually became the new record. I’m very lucky that they trusted me to help them see it to the end. It was a super collaborative process and it was a very organic evolution over the last three years from being the guy that hit record for the demos to really being included in the various creative exchanges that take place during the recording process. This would be a big project for anyone but it’s certainly a huge project for me.

"There's a reason Pearl Jam is still going strong 30 years in. The guys care deeply about the details that matter and they’re determined to let go of the things that don’t."

Outside of his studio experience with Pearl Jam (he also worked on their 2017 cover of Brandi Carlile's "Again Today" for her Cover Stories tribute album and their 2018 standalone single "Can’t Deny Me"), Evans has also garnered production credits for his engineering and mixing work with artists like Soundgarden, Carlile, Gary Clark, Jr., and the Secret Sisters. However, the particular designation of being a co-producer on Gigaton was not just notable for Evans individually, as it also marked a shift in Pearl Jam’s longtime relationship with GRAMMY-winning producer Brendan O’Brien, who has famously worked with the band on nine of their 10 previous albums. O’Brien still appears on Gigaton playing keyboards on "Quick Escape" and "Retrograde."

Josh Evans: I'm the biggest Brendan O'Brien fan because he's really the reason I got into recording in the first place. When I was a teenager in Seattle in the 1990s, I’d see his name on all of these albums that I loved—Black Crowes, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Pearl Jam, of course. After I started working with the band, I was in the studio with Brendan and the guys during the recording of Backspacer and Lightning Bolt and I found out that a day in the studio with Brendan is like a year's worth of studio knowledge. He’s such an incredible producer and on this album, I just wanted to carry on the high standard that he had already set in his work with them.

As the recording sessions for what would become Gigaton started up in early 2017, Evans quickly noticed that the band was operating within a very open, experimental attitude towards their new songs. Some songs were written with all of the band members jamming together in the same room at the same time and some were systematically built within multiple sessions, across multiple locations, over multiple years. Everyone’s ideas were equally on the table for consideration in service of whatever helped best support each song. This experimental environment is readily apparent in the instrumental tracklisting of the new songs, as Evans is credited with contributing instrumentation to six of the album’s 12 tracks and band members can occasionally be seen playing gear outside of their own sonic status quo: guitarist Stone Gossard played bass on "Dance Of The Clairvoyants," bassist Jeff Ament added kalimba (a metallic African thumb piano) to "Alright" and "River Cross," guitarist Mike McCready contributed some keyboard parts to "Retrograde," and drummer Matt Cameron played guitars on "Take The Long Way" and "Alright."

Josh Evans: Each band member is such a talented multi-instrumentalist—I mean, just listen to any of their solo albums—and I think the instrument-swapping was sort of a side effect of the intentional experimentation process for this record. None of the guys have any ego about who's playing what. They're only concerned about the end result. That was sort of the directive during recording: if it sounds good, we’re keeping it, no matter who’s playing it. On "Dance Of The Clairvoyants," Stone was listening to Matt's electronic drum loop and heard a bass line in his head, so he put it down. When Jeff heard it, he really liked it and didn’t have the ego to think he needed to be the one playing the bass on that song.  Even though Matt is the drummer, he’s such a talented guitar player and laid down a lot of the guitar on "Take The Long Way" and added these nice 12-string acoustic touches on "Alright" that sounded so great. Sometimes they would lay something down and then tell me to mess around with it or add something weird to it myself. It was a very open process and they were very generous and brave to want to share their songs with me like that.

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Back in late January, Pearl Jam released Gigaton’s electronic-influenced lead single, "Dance Of The Clairvoyants," along with a trio of interconnected music videos; with the band deeming the third version to be their first official video in over seven years. Critical reception to the band’s bold creative evolution was initially mixed, due in large part to the sonic shift of mechanized-sounding drum patterns, New Wave synth fills, and Vedder’s undeniably Talking Heads-esque vocal delivery. However, while some listeners may yearn for the band’s more signature sonic ingredients, Evans sees the buoyantly captivating single as a refreshing merger of the band’s longtime influences and current creative freedoms.              

Josh Evans: For me, this song is the centerpiece for the record, both sonically and as a representation of this experimental way of working. All of the guys are huge music fans with diverse musical tastes that include some things that would probably surprise most fans. Up until now, the musical references that have come through most noticeably in their songs are the big ones: The Who, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, The Clash, maybe some Springsteen. Those influences have been really clear. But Ed is also a really big fan of stuff like early Genesis and Talking Heads, which is what makes his vocal on "Dance Of The Clairvoyants" sound so natural. It comes from the same place as his Roger Daltrey-esque screams.

One thing that I'm really proud of on this song is how it continually developed and what we were able to do with the drum sounds. It started out simply enough with this electronic drum beat that Matt had made—no harmonic content, no chords, no bassline. Stone really liked it and heard a bassline that he wanted to put on it. Jeff said he could hear some keyboard stuff and the guitars that you hear on the chorus, so he added both of those. Later on, Mike came up with those funky, Bowie-like rhythm guitar stabs that really set the track on fire. After Matt heard everything together, he really wanted to play live drums on it, but everyone loved the feel of what he brought to that original processed beat and they wanted to retain the unique sonic impact of the electronic drums. So, Neil Hundt, who is Matt’s drum tech, and I spent a day in the warehouse studio with all of Matt’s gear trying to find the right combination to recreate the electronic programmed sounds with live acoustic drums. We tried all sorts of different options—taping up the drumheads, putting pillows in the kick drum, "not this one, let’s try that one over there"—so that what you hear on the record is actually Matt's live performance on acoustic drums. The only sound that remained from Matt’s original electronic beat is this specific hi-hat pattern. He also nuanced his playing throughout the recording, starting off real tight and controlled and then gradually opening it up a bit as the song progressed. It all ended up being this cool human-machine kind of performance that’s really the best of both worlds.

A little less than a month after surprising listeners with "Dance Of The Clairvoyants," the band released the album’s second single, a prototypical PJ rumbler called "Superblood Wolfman." In the lead-up to the single's rollout, the band offered up an augmented reality teaser that involved fans visiting a specific website and pointing their smartphones at the moon, which activated onscreen animations and a preview snippet of the new track. Wanting to create another cool music video as well, the band contacted animator Keith Ross of @TinyConcert who draws deceptively simplistic musical shorts with only a ballpoint pen. "Superblood Wolfmoon" is his first full-length music video and perfectly captures the song’s passionately raw, down-and-dirty vibe.         

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Josh Evans: For "Superblood Wolfmoon," Ed came in with a pretty fleshed-out demo that he had recorded himself with some guitars laid over a drum machine program. It was kind of sloppy and wild and the guys just wanted to capture that same messy vibe and expand on it a bit within a full band context. We tracked it all in the same room at the same time. The experimental aspect of that one has to do with its arrangement like I still don’t know which part is supposed to be considered the chorus or which section is technically the bridge. On previous albums, we might've tried to chop up the song or define the sections a bit more, but this time around it was more about the energy and the attitude. It’s an exciting and intense song, so we intentionally tried not to overthink it or try to force it into some specific structure.

Earlier this month, the band dropped Gigaton’s final pre-release single, "Quick Escape," a multi-riff monster of a song with a thick, Led Zeppelin-like swagger that thuds and lilts on the impressively propulsive bass-drum-guitar interplay. While this track evokes the "in the room" feel of all five guys looking each other in the eyes as they lock into this massive groove, the truth behind’s its creation is that it was far more a construction than a channeling. In fact, the first time that all five guys actually played “Quick Escape” all together in the same place was during rehearsal for their upcoming tour.

Josh Evans: This one came together through more of a collage-style assembly. It had a few different drum approaches that were chopped and edited. Jeff’s bass part is from his original demo that was recorded in Montana—just a one microphone on a bass amp kind of thing. It just sounded so great that we decided to use it and not rerecord it. Jeff also played those main electric guitar stabs. Stone added that first buzzy solo that you hear and then Mike’s solo at the end is just him lining up all of his effects pedals, dialing in a cool tone, and letting loose. That’s a first-take solo as well, we didn’t touch it up at all. I think this is one that will really hit live and hopefully go on for about five extra minutes at the end.  

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“Quick Escape” also features some of Vedder’s most politically direct lyrical commentary since 2002’s “Bu$hleaguer” from the band’s Riot Act album. Using quasi-science fiction themes (alongside shout-outs to Queen and Jack Kerouac), Vedder unfolds a global-to-interstellar journey “to find a place Trump hadn’t fucked up yet.” In the same vein, Vedder also directly calls out Trump – though not exactly by his given name – in the charmingly melodic “Seven O’Clock,” referring to him as “Sitting Bullshit” and wondering “Talking to his mirror, what’s he say, what’s it say back? A tragedy of errors, who’ll be last to have a laugh?” Similarly incensed political sentiments can be found in “Who Ever Said,” “Never Destination” and album closer “River Cross” as well. Though the band has never really shied away from directly engaging in socio-political issues throughout its career, Gigaton feels especially forthright in its attempts to speak clearly and candidly into the current cultural unrest. However, it should be noted that the lasting impression of the album forsakes nihilism and apathy in favor of hope and activism; as evidenced by Vedder’s call-to-action in “Seven O’Clock” (“this fucked-up situation calls for all hands on deck”) and his existential longing in “Superblood Wolfmoon” (“I’ve been hoping that our hope dies last”).    

Josh Evans: There wasn’t a lot of overt discussions regarding any of the lyrics. These guys all trust each other and trust each other’s instincts. When we started up this project in 2017, we started every day like most Americans, drinking a cup of coffee and asking each other if they had seen the previous day’s news: “Can you believe this? What’s going on here?” Like so many other people, we were just trying to make sense of it all. We all have kids and were questioning what kind of world we were creating and leaving for them. These guys have always cared deeply about that. It’s sort of eerie how even more relevant some of these ideas and themes have become in the past few weeks. That’s really the magic of this band is that sometimes it seems they’re tapped into things that we didn’t know where even there to be tapped into. We all have to find something to hang onto because it's dark right now. What’s the alternative these days?

Rounding out the sonically diverse and thematically experimental album are a couple outliers written by other band members (Cameron’s multi-metered "Take The Long Way” and a slippery waltz from Gossard called “Buckle Up”) and two of Vedder’s most emotionally intimate numbers: “Comes The Goes” and “River Cross.” The former finds Vedder having a poignant one-way conversation over his own twangy, acoustic blues strumming and the latter features his moving baritone lamenting over the invitational wheezing of Vedder’s nineteenth-century pump organ. For all of the successful sonic layering and instrumental adventurousness that takes place throughout Gigaton, both “Comes and Goes” and “River Cross” benefit greatly from the band’s underrated use of restraint and space.

Josh Evans: Some of the other songs on the album were really labored over but “Comes Then Goes” was just about capturing Ed’s performance and then not messing with it too much. We added a couple little things, some feedback textures and an electric guitar doubling the acoustic in spots, but it was mainly about Ed’s performance and his lyrics. Same with “River Cross,” the song is so solemn and cinematic that it didn’t need any extra ear candy. It was so cool to be able to mix this ancient-sounding pump organ from the 1800s with modern-day synthesizers and electric guitars in a way that still felt sacred and prayerful. Thelonius Monk had this famous list of rules for musicians and the one that was most powerful to me was “Don’t play everything, some music is just imagined. What you don’t play can be more important than what you do play.” Sometimes you have to just imply what could be there instead of adding so much in. In some songs, it’s more magical for there to be ideas that only exist in the listener’s mind. This band really understands how to leave the space for that to happen.     

How Pearl Jam's "Unplugged" Performance Captured The Grunge Gods' Pop Cultural Rise

When Pearl Jam threw their hands together on the cover of their debut album Ten, they laid an architecturally sound foundation — to stay unified, unbroken, always honing. Much like their hero (and collaborator) Neil Young, their aesthetic blueprint was established from the jump: on every album in Ten’s wake, they’ve dug a little (or a lot) deeper into that ineffable essence.

Pearl Jam have never made a bad record; they’ve only swung their pickaxe at that mine and been variably rewarded. On 2000’s Binaural, they hit a seam of simmering psychedelia; on its follow-up, the underrated, desolate Riot Act, they stumbled on a yawning, haunted chasm. 2009’s Backspacer, 2013’s Lightning Bolt and 2020’s Gigaton were all hailed as returns to form, yet none of them totally flipped the script.

Enter Dark Matter, their new album, produced by the young wunderkind Andrew Watt, due out April 19. Singer Eddie Vedder has declared, "No hyperbole, I think this is our best work." This time, that really feels apt: Watt’s abundant, kinetic energy and clear love for their legacy clearly knocked a few cobwebs loose.

Just listen to singles "Running" and "Dark Matter" — or album tracks, like the epic ballad "Wreckage," and how they build to neck-snapping fever pitches. Pearl Jam have always had batteries in their backs, but they haven’t sounded this young and hungry in decades.

"I think he loves the band from what he has seen us live. He knows that we, in certain moments, are unhinged," founding guitarist Stone Gossard tells GRAMMY.com of the irrepressible Watt, who’s also whipped the Rolling Stones and Ozzy Osbourne back into fighting shape. "That's part of what we do."

"It’s where rock and roll meets just religious ecstasy, where it's not about anything other than movement and rhythm and noise," Gossard adds. "And it turns into something that's not a song, but a ritual or something… sometimes, as you get older as a band, you can lose touch of that."

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Can you talk about Dark Matter’s sound? It feels so different from past Pearl Jam records, in a great way — it seems to emanate from a dark center, to all sides of the soundfield.

The sonics of it is really Andrew Watt. That’s his dream — of loving rock music, and then being in the pop world, then learning and understanding that world so well. And then going back to all of his favorite bands from when he was a kid and making records with them, which is hilarious. 

Because I keep saying this, "We're just in Andrew's dream and we're just kind of a sidebar. This is really the Andrew Watt story that's actually going on right now, and we're all just part of it."

But he really has a very distinctive sonic style. He has a studio that we just walked into the first day making this record, and it's just gear already out, ready to go: "What kind of guitar do you want? Here's an amp, whatever, the drums are here. We’ve got a microphone in the closet."

Usually, if you're in a band — and especially a band for 20 or 30 years — when you decide to do something, then your gear shows up and your guy shows up, and then all your guys argue with each other about where their stuff's going to go, it's a drama. This was no drama. There was no work involved. We just walked in and played.

It sounded like the record right away. He's running things through the chains that he wants. The way he uses compression, and the way he uses reverb, and the guitar sounds he likes, and how he places things — he's a sonic artist.

So it sounds exciting, and really live. And yet, also you can really hear the details, and it's not a mess.

It’s interesting that you bring up Watt’s pop background. Pearl Jam has always seemed at odds with how things are typically done in the music industry, so it’s great that you’re able to retrieve what you need from the machine.

Well, there's the world of pop music in terms of your perception of it, in terms of what it represents.

But also, the structures that we're dealing with in rock songs and pop songs — basically, the form is still the same. You're starting out with one part and maybe there's a variation, but it's tension and release and it's a few chords and it's a beat and it's a piece of poetry.

Those things can fit together in a lot of different ways, but there's things about pop music that are foundational to all music. There's things about it that work, and work for a reason. It gets bastardized and homogenized and all that.

So, we're still writing rock songs and pop songs — but we like to make them a little hairier, generally.

I see how the Dark Matter sessions could be the Watt show. But I’m sure it was a reciprocal conversation. What references were you throwing back at him, from the millions of miles the band’s traveled together?

Well, he’s a fan. He’s a Ten Club member from way, way back. He fell in love with Pearl Jam when he was 15 years old.

He met [guitarist] Mike McCready outside of a Robin Hood fundraiser in New York. He was with his dad, and Andrew and his dad came up and said, "This is my son Andrew; he's a musician; he really wants to become a rock star. He wants to be in bands and make records. And Mike, do you have any advice you can give him?"

And Mike said, "Finish up your college your dad wants you to, and make sure you got your bases covered." And then Andrew, of course, just went in the opposite direction and said, "Oh, I'm just going to conquer the world and then I'm going to come back and produce your band, Mike McCready."

So I love that. I love that he has that history with us. And I just think that he comes from a place, he's a real fan of the band. His enthusiasm really drove the process and his understanding of the things that he loves about us. He really wanted us to make an aggressive record. He really fell in love with our unhinged side from when he was a kid. But just loved the different ways that we had fit together as a kid.

I think he was encouraging us to find those same sort of things that worked in the past. And he's an experimenter. He's ready for anything. You can say no to him. I mean, you’ve got to be forceful. We were a united front a few times and just said, "No, we're going to do this," or whatever. But he made a lot of good decisions, and helped us make a lot of good decisions.

And I think the record, the arrangements, even just them playing now — when we're just starting to rehearse them, the songs are playing well, they're playing themselves. There's no ambiguity to them, where it's mushy. They're strong — lyrically, melodically, rhythmically. All the stool legs are in place.

As I understand it, there were no demos, and Eddie was reacting to the energy in the room, and writing in the moment. This is a great batch of lyrics. They hit you in the solar plexus.

I think one thing that we've learned over the years is that Eddie is more active and more inspired and will finish more songs — and get more excited about songs — when he's in the process of writing with the band.

So, if it's us against the world, and we're stepping into a studio — someone's throwing out a riff or someone's got an idea, and then it gets tweaked and molded — he's going to do his damnedest to make that thing. If he's in on it and feels part of it, he's going to do his damnedest to make that thing have legs and survive.

You're less likely to have something happen if you send him something than you are if you plan something when he's in the room and you're working it out. Just make it about that moment.

It's like, "I don't care about all the different things you thought your song should be or how many different ways it could go, or if it's reggae… let's try it right now with everybody and see how everyone plays it, and feels it —and do I feel it?"

And a lot of times he does, and we find that. And then once he starts going, then all of us are — phew! The energy goes up.

One of my favorite songs on Dark Matter is "Wreckage." That one builds unbelievably.

That’s really Andrew and Ed back and forth, discovering that arrangement, and the push and pull of where that song could go. I think it hit a sweet spot. All of us are part of it, but it’s understated in a way that I think is really beautiful.

It builds in a way that feels natural; it doesn’t feel gratuitous to me. It feels like a destination: you’ve reached it, and you deserve it at that point. There’s a lot going on harmonically, but the chords are very simple.

The other is "Something Special." Partly because I was looking at message boards, where the peanut gallery was complaining about its naked sentimentality. I was thinking, You don’t get it! This is straight from the heart.

Where you are in your life, and why that lyric means something to you — yeah, it’s different for everyone.

That’s a Josh Klinghoffer composition.  He’s become part of our band in a way that’s so amazing — his voice and his musicality. He’s really almost become our musical bandleader at this point, which is the best, because he’s charming and hilarious and fun to be around and always game.

Josh had this great riff. Immediately, Andrew and Ed changed a bunch of chords and moved it all around, but it turned out great. We’ve been playing it in rehearsals. It’s got great chords; it’s beautiful, sentimental and gorgeous.

And we need that on the record. The record’s pretty bleak. It’s not uplifting, necessarily. So, yeah — sometimes, you go home, and you just hang out, and you’ve got to just tell the people you love how much you love them.

Songbook: A Guide To The Smashing Pumpkins In Three Eras, From Gish To Atum

While in a studio, Andrew Watt bounces off the walls. Just ask Mick Jagger, who once had to gently tell the 33-year-old, "Look, I can deal with this, but when you meet Ronnie and Keith, you have to dial it down a little bit."

Or ask Pearl Jam's Stone Gossard. "He really got the best out of [drummer] Matt [Cameron] just by being excited — literally jumping up and down and pumping his fist and running around," he tells GRAMMY.com.

As Watt's hot streak has burned on, reams have rightly been written about his ability to take a legacy act, reconnect them with their essence, and put a battery in their back. His efficacy can be seen at Music's Biggest Night: Ozzy Osbourne's Patient Number 9 won Best Rock Album at the 2023 GRAMMYs. At the last ceremony, the Rolling Stones were nominated for Best Rock Song, for Hackney Diamonds' opener "Angry."

On Pearl Jam's return to form, Dark Matter, due out April 19. Who was behind the desk? Take a wild guess.

"You want to see them live more than you want to listen to their albums, and they have the ability to look at each other and play and follow each other. I don't like my rock music any other way, as a listener," Watt tells GRAMMY.com. "All my favorite records are made like that — of people speeding up, slowing down, playing longer than they should."

As such, Watt had a lightbulb moment: to not record any demos, and have them write together in the room. "They're all playing different stuff, and it makes up what Pearl Jam is, and singer Eddie [Vedder] rides it like a wave."

If you're more of a pop listener, there's tons of Watt for you — he's worked with Justin Bieber ("Hit the Ground" from Purpose), Lana Del Rey ("Doin' Time" from Norman F—ing Rockwell) and much more. Read on for a breakdown of big name rockers who have worked with Andrew Watt.

Pearl Jam / Eddie Vedder

Watt didn't just produce Dark Matter; he also helmed Vedder's well-received third solo album, Earthling, from 2022. Watt plays guitar in Vedder's live backing band, known as the Earthlings — which also includes Josh Klinghoffer, who replaced John Frusciante in the Red Hot Chili Peppers for a stint.

The Rolling Stones

Dark Matter was a comeback for Pearl Jam, but Hackney Diamonds was really a comeback for the Stones. While it had a hater or two, the overwhelming consensus was that it was the Stones' best album in decades — maybe even since 1978's Some Girls.

"I hope what makes it fresh and modern comes down to the way it's mixed, with focus on low end and making sure the drums are big," Watt, who wore a different Stones shirt every day in the studio, has said about Hackney Diamonds. "But the record is recorded like a Stones album."

Where there are modern rock flourishes on Hackney Diamonds, "There's no click tracks. There's no gridding. There's no computer editing," he continued. "This s— is performed live and it speeds up and slows down. It's made to the f—ing heartbeat connection of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Steve Jordan.

"And Charlie," Watt added, tipping a hat to Watts, who played on Hackney Diamonds but died before it came out. "When Charlie's on it."

Iggy Pop

Ever since he first picked up a mic and removed his shirt, the snapping junkyard dog of the Stooges has stayed relevant — as far as indie, alternative and punk music has been concerned.

But aside from bright spots like 2016's Josh Homme-produced Post Pop Depression, his late-career output has felt occasionally indulgent and enervated. The 11 songs on 2023's eclectic Watt-produced Every Loser, on the other hand, slap you in the face in 11 different ways.

"We would jam and make tracks and send them to Iggy, and he would like 'em and write to them or wouldn't like them and we'd do something else," Watt told Billboard. "It was very low pressure. We just kept making music until we felt like we had an album." (And as with Pearl Jam and Vedder's Earthlings band, Watt has rocked out onstage with Pop.

Ozzy Osbourne

You dropped your crown, O Prince of Darkness. When he hooked up with Watt, the original Black Sabbath frontman hadn't released any solo music since 2010's Scream; in 2017, Sabbath finally said goodbye after 49 years and 10 (!) singers.

On 2020's Ordinary Man and 2022's Patient Number 9, Watt reenergized Ozzy; even when he sounds his age, Ozz sounds resolute, defiant, spitting in the face of the Reaper. (A bittersweet aside: the late Taylor Hawkins appears on Patient Number 9, which was written and recorded in just four days.)

Maroon 5

Yeah, yeah, they're more of a pop-rock band, but they have guitars, bass and drums. (And if you're the type of rock fan who's neutral or hostile to the 5, you shouldn't be; Songs About Jane slaps.)

At any rate, Watt co-produced "Can't Leave You Alone," featuring Juice WRLD, from 2021's Jordi. Critics disparaged the album, but showed Watt's facility straddling the pop and rock worlds.

5 Seconds of Summer

When it comes to Andrew Watt, the Sydney pop-rockers — slightly more on the rock end than Maroon 5 and their ilk — are repeat customers. He produced a number of tracks for 5 Seconds of Summer, which spanned 2018's Youngblood, 2020's Calm and 2022's 5SOS5.

Regarding the former: Watt has cited Youngblood as one of the defining recording experiences of his life.

"I had started working with 5 Seconds of Summer, and a lot of people looked at them as a boy band, but they're not," Watt told Guitar Player. "They're all incredible musicians. They can all play every instrument. They love rock music. They can harmonize like skyrockets in flight. They just were making the wrong kind of music."

So Watt showed 5 Seconds of Summer a number of mainstays of the rock era, like Tears for Fears and the Police. The rest, as they say, is history.

Elton John

A year after Britney Spears was unshackled from her highly controversial conservatorship, it was time for a victory lap with the God of Glitter. What resulted was a curious little bauble, which became a megahit: "Hold Me Closer," a spin on "Tiny Dancer," "The One" and "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" that briefly launched Spears back into the stratosphere.

"Britney came in and she knew what she wanted to do," Watt recalled to The L.A. Times. "We sped up the song a little bit and she sang the verses in her falsetto, which harkens back to 'Toxic.' She was having a blast."

Blink-182

Watt has also worked with pop/punk heroes Blink-182 — but not after Tom DeLonge made his grand return. He produced "I Really Wish I Hated You" from 2019's Nine, back when Matt Skiba was in the band.

Where in the rock world will this tender-aged superproducer strike next? Watt knows.

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Updated Friday Oct. 13, 2023 to include info about Kendrick Lamar's most recent GRAMMY wins, as of the 2023 GRAMMYs.

A GRAMMY veteran these days, Kendrick Lamar has won 17 GRAMMYs and has received 47 GRAMMY nominations overall. A sizable chunk of his trophies came from the 58th annual GRAMMY Awards in 2016, when he walked away with five — including his first-ever win in the Best Rap Album category.

This installment of GRAMMY Rewind turns back the clock to 2016, revisiting Lamar's acceptance speech upon winning Best Rap Album for To Pimp A Butterfly. Though Lamar was alone on stage, he made it clear that he wouldn't be at the top of his game without the help of a broad support system. 

"First off, all glory to God, that's for sure," he said, kicking off a speech that went on to thank his parents, who he described as his "those who gave me the responsibility of knowing, of accepting the good with the bad."

Looking for more GRAMMYs news? The 2024 GRAMMY nominations are here!

He also extended his love and gratitude to his fiancée, Whitney Alford, and shouted out his Top Dawg Entertainment labelmates. Lamar specifically praised Top Dawg's CEO, Anthony Tiffith, for finding and developing raw talent that might not otherwise get the chance to pursue their musical dreams.

"We'd never forget that: Taking these kids out of the projects, out of Compton, and putting them right here on this stage, to be the best that they can be," Lamar — a Compton native himself — continued, leading into an impassioned conclusion spotlighting some of the cornerstone rap albums that came before To Pimp a Butterfly.

"Hip-hop. Ice Cube. This is for hip-hop," he said. "This is for Snoop Dogg, Doggystyle. This is for Illmatic, this is for Nas. We will live forever. Believe that."

To Pimp a Butterfly singles "Alright" and "These Walls" earned Lamar three more GRAMMYs that night, the former winning Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song and the latter taking Best Rap/Sung Collaboration (the song features Bilal, Anna Wise and Thundercat). He also won Best Music Video for the remix of Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood." 

Lamar has since won Best Rap Album two more times, taking home the golden gramophone in 2018 for his blockbuster LP DAMN., and in 2023 for his bold fifth album, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.

Watch Lamar's full acceptance speech above, and check back at GRAMMY.com every Friday for more GRAMMY Rewind episodes. 

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Are you familiar with the concept of a chordless ensemble? In jazz, it refers to a group format without a chordal instrument, like a piano or guitar. Without such instruments to underpin the chord changes, the music can become spacious — exuding what one writer characterized as "a devil-may-care freedom."

But for Christian McBride, who just released an album with his chordless quartet, freedom is relative.

"I feel like I almost have more responsibility because it's not my goal to play free without some sort of gravitational pull to it," the eight-time GRAMMY-winning bassist, composer, arranger and bandleader tells GRAMMY.com. "Freedom is much more exciting when there are some sort of parameters, or you have something to break through."

So, in adding another entry to the catalog of revered chordless jazz albums — Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity, Sonny Rollins' Way Out West, Lee Konitz' Motion, numberless Ornette Coleman masterworks, et al — McBride assembled the best men for the job. Those are trumpeter Josh Evans, saxophonist and bass clarinetist Marcus Strickland, and drummer Nasheet Waits. 

Together, they comprise Christian McBride's New Jawn — another vehicle for the mastermind in parallel to his other ensembles, such as Inside Straight and the Christian McBride Big Band. 

Their album, Prime, released Feb. 24, marks an intrepid new chapter for McBride and his colleagues. Therein, the quartet utilizes the frameworks of originals (like McBride's "Head Bedlam" and "Lurkers," Strickland's title track, Waits' "Moonchild," and Evans' "Dolphy Dust") alongside compositions by Coleman, Sonny Rollins and Larry Young to challenge and galvanize each other.

"At this point, I just concentrate on making sure that these cats are in the most comfortable situation —  or maybe not so comfortable, so they might have to dig a little deeper," McBride said in a statement. "It's a balance."

To hear how that balancing act is executed, just listen to the fantastic Prime — and read on for an in-depth interview with McBride about the past, present and future of the New Jawn, and how freedom often needs guidelines to be truly free.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Tell me how Christian McBride's New Jawn came to be. How did you constellate with these fellow masters?

I started doing a residency at the Village Vanguard back in 2009, I believe it was. Starting around 2012, my residency went from one week to two weeks, and so I always had an opportunity to bring a second band or have some sort of a week where I could experiment with some group that I didn't usually play with.

In December of 2015, I thought I wanted to try a new group — something that was a 180 degree turn from what I had been doing. My trio with [pianist] Christian Sands and [drummer] Ulysses Owens Jr. recorded a live album at the Vanguard the year before, and we had also released an album called Out Here in 2013. I just wanted to do something completely different.

Marcus Strickland is someone that I have worked with many times in the past. Nasheet Waits is someone that I knew for a very long time, but hadn't had a chance to work with very much. I had talked to a few musicians who I respected, and I told them what I had in mind: I wanted to do a pianoless quartet, a group that was kind of on the outskirts — not all the way out, but just kind of walking that fine line.

A lot of people said "For what you are describing, you might want to check out Josh Evans." I knew who Josh was — I hadn't played with him yet — so I kind of YouTube-stalked him. I went and heard him a couple of times at Smalls, and he was the guy. So, that's how the New Jawn first got together in December of 2015.

And that's been my main unit pretty much ever since. I still have Inside Straight; that's been my longest running group. I still have my big band, but the New Jawn has been the group that I've probably played with the most since 2015.

Tell me more about your long relationships with Marcus and Nasheet.

I don't really have a lot of history with Nasheet before this group, because I first met him in the mid '90s when he was playing with my friend Antonio Hart. I just always loved the way he played, and then, of course, he became a member of Jason Moran's Bandwagon trio. That trio has been pushing the limits — the outer limits, so to speak — for quite some time.

I became a bigger fan of Nasheet's after I heard him with Jason, so I just took a shot in the dark. I said, "Hey, man, come play this Vanguard gig with me."

We did one gig together in 2011 or early 2012, with Jason [and saxophonists] James Carter and Hamiet Bluiett. It was a tribute to [pianist] Don Pullen, and that gig was so wonderful, I knew that if we had a chance to play together on the regular, that it would be special. So, that's pretty much my history with Nasheet.

Marcus Strickland, I had done some playing with his twin brother E.J. in the late '90s when he was a student at the New School, and I think I first met Marcus when he was playing with [legendary drummer] Roy Haynes. It was in the early 2000s.

We finally started playing together when we made a few gigs with [drummer] Jeff "Tain" Watts' group, and that must have been around 2004, 2005, somewhere in there. Marcus also started subbing for [saxophonist] Ron Blake in my band, the Christian McBride Band, when Ron got the gig with “SNL.” So, yeah, Marcus and I go back 20-plus years.

*Christian McBride's New Jawn. Photo: Ebru Yildiz*

Can you talk about the freedom that a chordless ensemble confers?

Well, I always feel like freedom is relative, because it's not so much the band or having chords or no chords. It's the concept of the band, the band leader, just sort of your collective MO.

As a bassist, I feel like I almost have more responsibility because it's not my goal to play free without some sort of gravitational pull to it. Freedom is much more exciting when there are some sort of parameters, or you have something to break through.

If you go on stage and you just simply play free without a landing point or some sort of navigation, then I feel like you're kind of running in a circle, or you're just running with no destination — and when you finally land somewhere, you're kind of like, Now what? Now, that could be fun for the musicians, but I have a feeling it may or may not be that fun for the person that's listening to you.Playing in this particular group, I like the fact that we play songs that have a form, but we don't always follow that form. We break through that form, but we eventually come back to it, which is what... That's why Miles Davis' Second Great Quintet was so special, because they used the form to show what could be done if you break it down and then reconstruct it. So, that's what we try to do in this group.

There are some inspired writing contributions from all members of the group, as far as I understand, and renditions of Larry Young, Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman tunes. How did this particular sequence of songs come to be? I'm sure you four all work on so many things and are inspired by so many things that there were a lot of contenders for the record.

So, we recorded this at the end of 2021, I believe. We were fresh off of the gig at the Vanguard, so a lot of the stuff that we recorded were things that we had worked on that week.

It wasn't really that difficult to figure out what the material was going to be. I think putting a recording together is not that dissimilar to putting a set together. You want to make sure you start off with something exciting — something that's going to lock the people in as best as you think you can, and then you just try to shape it so it's a good listening experience.

I'd love to home in on three of the originals. The title track, written by Marcus, was inspired by a battle in the Transformers movies; you're quoted as calling it "one of the baddest tunes you've ever heard."

Marcus had recorded that on one of his solo albums a few years before [2011's Triumph of the Heavy, Vol. 2, and his version also had no chords. So, he obviously knew that this song would be a perfect fit for this band.

It's got a really great melody; it's got a very interesting bassline. It's a bassline that pretty much stays kind of locked in throughout the solo section, and it just makes for a lot of exciting movement throughout the piece. Marcus composed something really hip there.

"Moonchild", written by Nasheet, has this incredibly potent vibe. Can you talk about how you jointly landed on that kind of crawling, crepuscular feeling?

What I love about Nasheet is that he's known for being this volcanic drummer, but the two prettiest songs that this band plays were both written by Nasheet: "Moonchild" on this new album, and "Kush" on our first album.

So, his creative spectrum is quite broad. And I think the way we recorded it, is we were rehearsing it. That song originally had tempo, but when we were kind of reading it down and kind of learning it, we were reading down the music separately, so we weren't playing it together. And Nasheet said, "Hey, I kind of like it like that; let's play it rubato."

We played it a couple of times, and then Josh and Marcus kind of worked it out where they could still play it in unison, but not quite in time. And again, that's kind of what I mean by having some parameters — having a little bit of a form so you can kind of tug, you could push, you could pull. And that's the way that came about.

Finally, the one I wanted to home in on is "Dolphy Dust" — my personal favorite on the record. What does Dolphy mean to you and collectively, what can you speak to for his presence in all your creative lives?

Well, that's Josh Evans' tune, as you know. Josh is a big time historian.

And it is sort of weird how being a historian in jazz gets interpreted, because some feel that knowing the history of jazz is a necessity, and some people think being a historian puts creative shackles on you. As in, you're not able to create music without always having some sort of conscious historical reference. I feel when Josh wrote this song, he told me that this was something that he just heard in his head.

He kept hearing the melodies slowly over the course of a couple of weeks — like, four bars here, four bars there. And when he finally flushed it out and it became a song, he said, "Yeah, I feel like this has some Dolphy-isms in it."

It's hard because, again, I think with jazz connoisseurs, even if you don't write a song that references somebody like Eric Dolphy, somebody's going to do it anyway. I feel like Eric Dolphy plays as much of a part in our creative and jazz history lives as Max Roach or Booker Little or Jackie McLean or anybody who was a part of their era at that time.

Dolphy, of course, was one of the important figures in jazz in the early '60s. He tragically died young, which always, sadly, adds to a myth of people. It's weird. I hear people now talk about how important Roy Hargrove was. It's like, well, he actually was that important when he was alive. But now that he's not here, we recognize how important he is.

So I think with Eric Dolphy, he is equally as much a part of our intake of jazz history as anyone. But Josh captured that spirit in this piece accidentally. He was not thinking of Eric Dolphy when he wrote that song. He thought of that after he wrote it.

In the press release, you said: "At this point, I just concentrate on making sure that these cats are in the most comfortable situation — or maybe not so comfortable, you know, so they might have to dig a little deeper." How do you bring the musicians out to where their feet might not exactly touch the bottom?

Well, again, when you play a music as creative as jazz or some sort of improvisational music, the fun part — the challenge — is you do know where you're going, but you kind of don't know how you're going to get there.

Or you have a route planned out because you know that's how you need to get to where you have to go, but sometimes a road might be closed, you'll get detoured, there'll be a traffic jam. And sometimes, when you're playing this kind of music, somebody in the band could always divert you to another route.

And that's what the fun part is about playing this music. You want the band to feel like you all can trust each other, because when those detours happen, you know you're not going to get led off the cliff. Or, if you do get pushed off the cliff, there's going to be someone at the bottom to catch you so you don't crash.

So that's what I mean about putting musicians in a situation where they feel comfortable, but not too comfortable.

I look forward to your run at Dizzy's soon. How's the chemistry between you four — or, by extension, you and any accompanists you work with — different on stage versus in the studio?

Well, the audience acts as sort of a fifth band member, which is why it can be difficult sometimes for jazz artists to create when the audience is kind of not interacting. I don't always blame the audience for that, because I know some artists don't want the audience to interact. I need the audience to interact. We're all human beings. We're playing for you. We're not playing at you.

It's never been my MO to play for the audience and say, "Hey, I need you to shut up and pay attention so you can understand how deep and how great we are." I play music, so I can say "Look, I need you to tell me if I'm correct, that these musicians up on stage are as great as I think they are. But in order for you to do that, you have to listen. Right?"

But I don't want you to sit on your hands and be nervous [about] interacting. So I've always been a person of the people. Yes, they do need to concentrate — I need audiences not to be rude — but I do want you to let me know how you're feeling about the music.

That's where things get different live versus in the studio when we just have each other. And frankly, that's enough too; that's fine.

You're each other's audiences.

Exactly. That's right.

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