Jeff Ament Quotations

We've always been a band that stood up for what we thought was right.

I don't have a great voice or even a good voice.

I didn't write this song. Someone was talking in a room. I just wrote down everything they said.

I feel like in a lot of ways I can relate to the fans, just being a fan of music myself.

I get lost in my right brain, especially in creative things.

I think at that point we were aspiring to be a Led Zeppelin kind of a band where you could pick up your acoustic instruments or you could go out and rock or you could play a country song. I love all those bands we got mentioned with, but it never felt like we fit into that group very well. So the fact that they're still saying, 'The band that survived grunge' is kind of funny.

Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love talked trash about the fact that I hooped. I once stopped to say 'Hi' before a show, and as I walked away, Courtney yelled, 'Go play basketball with Dave Grohl!'

Our first record didn't come out on vinyl, so I think that might have had something to do with actually being in a position to make sure that it came out in vinyl this time. It sounds way better.

I think I've become numb to that over the last 15 years,

Unless you're a vegan freak of nature like Tony Gonzalez, I don't think you can play sports much past your early 30s.

We opened for Black Flag, and none of the bands had dressing rooms, but Henry Rollins had his own. He had struck me as different from that.

We just finished making a record. Everybody wants to play shows, so we're going to after that.

We saw something starting to happen with the industry and we called them out on it,

We went to Big Sur about three years ago and hung out at the Esalen Institute.

Everything Ticketmaster stands for is what we're fighting against. They're just a small cog in a machine where the artist is at the bottom.

Everybody got away from what Pearl Jam are supposed to be.

I've seen kids turn their lives around. It's usually a kid who's outside of the team-sport world, or maybe has a darker personality or doesn't fit in. Skateboarding ends up being something they latch onto. It sounds hokey, but finding a focus on something - whether it's skateboard or playing your guitar - can be life changing.

People see Eddie for 20 seconds at the Grammys and think, Goddamn, he must be like this all the time. I feel sorry for his friends.

People from Farm Aid have approached us about shows. We'd never done it. So part of my pitch to the band is that this IS farm aid.

That's probably half the reason I wanted to be in a band - I wanted to see the world.

It's in the middle of the whole tour, so we'll get to go out and change it up a little bit. We love Tom and his band. It will be a cool, special show for people.

It's hard for us not to be involved with things. When you have so much information and you see so much need, there's too much going on for us not to get involved.

I led the state in defensive interceptions my senior year, with seven in nine games. Then I went to Montana to play basketball and found out quickly that my college career wasn't going to work out how I'd envisioned it.

I'm a big fan of power trios where there's only three instruments.

I had a portable 8-track player under all my ramps, cranking one of my four 8-tracks - Cars/'Candy-O,' Ramones/'Road To Ruin,' Cheap Trick/'Heaven Tonight' and the first Devo record. I don't remember skating without music.

I just have a serious problem with business for business' sake: this bottom-dollar mentality. I have a serious problem with evil.

Make movies. Don't make videos. Videos are evil.

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.

Ever since I picked up a bass, I've written songs.

I played djembe, percussion, keyboards and I sang.

This isn't a mass-produced...instrument. Mike Lull Custom Guitars makes each bass right here in the NW. Over 20 years of collaborating, designing, and building basses has gone into my model.

When I moved to Seattle, I was hanging out with kids who had done drugs, had sex a million times. I look at them now and realize their childhood was taken away.

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.

I'm not going to say no to playing a show in Missoula.

I love sad. Sadness makes you feel more than anything.

Where I grew up, I could be a punk rocker and a jock. But in college, it became apparent that those two worlds didn't mix. When I brought my guitar back to school after Thanksgiving break, a friend handed me his bass and said, 'Listen to the Ramones.'

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.

There really is a certain magic that happens when you're in the studio. And it's important in life to feel that magic: to feel that there is something greater moving all this along.

I'm healthy enough to still skate, so I gotta go because growing up I didn't have - I mean, I grew up in Montana so... there was kind of a little half-pipe in my yard, and that was the extent of the skate terrain in Montana. So I've got to go out and make up for lost time.

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.

I've been interested in Eastern religions since I went to college because I was trying to figure out where I stood with Catholicism.

Punk rock and skateboarding took the 'school' out of living your life, and I related to learning as I went, doing a lot of different things that I liked, when I liked. Consequently, I'm mediocre at all of the above, but still stoked on being a lifetime student of music, skating, painting, writing, etc.

I have to go someplace where I can soak myself in a creative atmosphere.

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.

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

I certainly didn't want to be in a punk rock band, because I had already been in a punk rock band. I wanted to be in a band that could do anything - like Led Zeppelin.

All you have to do is drive by the empty tennis courts and basketball courts and compare them to the skate parks... c'mon people, get with the program - the future is now!