Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready Is Honoring Chris Cornell and the Seattle Scene With a Rock Opera
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Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready is transforming the tragedies and triumphs of the Seattle grunge scene into a new rock opera, the guitarist told Guitar World magazine.
McCready offered the first taste of the project just last month when he shared a live performance of a new song, “Crying Moon,” which he wrote in tribute to Chris Cornell. The late Soundgarden frontman, as well as McCready’s friend and Temple of the Dog bandmate, is a primary influence for the new rock opera.
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“I look at him as one of the greatest singers and songwriters of all time, aside from being a friend,” McCready said. “I love Chris, and I’m working on a little project about the Seattle scene and a musical kind of rock opera thing. He’s part of it.”
While “Crying Moon” is part of the rock opera, McCready is still “in the middle of” working on it. “I’m working on a script, and I’ve got about 18 songs that I’m working on, and I’m singing on it. It’s been a long journey.” He added that he’s also still figuring out what form the project will take, suggesting it could be “a record and maybe some sort of stage/play thing.”
Elsewhere in the interview, McCready offered an update on Pearl Jam’s next album, which will be their first since 2020’s Gigaton. “It’s just about finished,” McCready said. “I think there’s a few tweaks here and there that have to happen, and we’re probably not going to have anything out this year.”
McCready also spoke about working with producer Andrew Watt on the LP. He credited the producer — who just helmed Eddie Vedder’s 2022 solo album Earthling — with bringing “an energy and a youthfulness and a great ear to us that I think we needed.”
He continued: “He got us into a room and just pushed us as hard as we could be pushed. You know, it’s hard for a quote-unquote outsider to come into our world because we’ve done things a certain way. We’re open to new things, but we are also in our own world. We’ve done things for 30 years. So we know the dynamics of our band very well. But sometimes we need to get pushed and questioned, and Andrew did a great job of that.”
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