Jeff Ament
Jeff Ament
Jeffrey Allen Amentis an American musician and songwriter who serves as the bassist for the American rock band Pearl Jam. Along with Stone Gossard, Mike McCready, and Eddie Vedder, he is one of the founding members of Pearl Jam. Ament is also known for his work prior to Pearl Jam with the 1980s Seattle-based grunge rock bands Green River and Mother Love Bone, and is particularly notable for his work with the fretless bass, upright bass, and twelve-string bass guitar...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionGuitarist
Date of Birth10 March 1963
CityHavre, MT
CountryUnited States of America
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.