It's great that people are basically spending their two weeks of vacation to come out and be with us in some weird part of the world. And I think we owe it to them to take 'em to some cool places.

Right after 'Backspacer,' my best friend got killed tragically. Something happened to me then where I got super motivated. I had a shelf of all this unfinished music... So I just went to work and made a conscious decision that I was going to finish a bunch of stuff. Life's short.

It's great that people are basically spending their two weeks of vacation to come out and be with us in some weird part of the world. And I think we owe it to them to take 'em to some cool places.

Every few years I'll party way too much to remind myself what an idiot I am.

With Pearl Jam, everybody is so good at what they do, it's hard to get up the courage to say, Can I sing this part, or, I want to play guitar. I feel like I have more courage to do that.

You go to a show and you know the crowd is there because they like the music, not because everybody else was going. That's a good feeling. You look out there and you know, these are our people.

It was hard to figure out what were the good causes, the bad causes, even the good politics and the bad politics. So we started taking requests and figuring it out.