PEARL JAM: New Album In The Works

PEARL JAM bassist Jeff Ament tells Billboard.com that the band has written 25 songs for a new album, to be recorded later this year. "April will be the time where we get together and learn to play all these demos and figure out which 12-15 of them float to the top," he said. According to Ament, the group has been focused on putting together reissues of its second and third albums, 1993's "Vs." and 1994's "Vitalogy", and working on a Cameron Crowde-directed documentary and book celebrating its 20th anniversary as a band.

PEARL JAM frontman Eddie Vedder is planning to release a solo album later this year. A new Vedder song called "Longing To Belong" popped up on a New York radio station on Monday (March 14) and it is reportedly from a new solo effort by Vedder, tentatively titled "Uke Songs", that may arrive in June. Vedder's previous solo album was not an official one, but the soundtrack to the 2007 movie "Into The Wild", for which he composed and performed nine new tracks.

Ament told The Pulse Of Radio that the way PEARL JAM has worked from the start leaves room for its members to do their own things as well. "I think the main thing is we wanted to be able to stretch out, and when I look at Ed and kind of what he's been able to do in terms of, like, you know, he's got his solo thing, and how he's pushed himself as a musician and creatively, you know, it makes me so proud of like, you know, how we were from the very beginning — how we wanted to be a band that could really dip our toes into a lot of different styles and dynamics," he said.

The first summer music festival ever put together by PEARL JAM itself will take place somewhere in the middle of the country this summer and feature a number of bands, along with PEARL JAM headlining both nights.