Do you agree when people say your new album is your strongest in years? It's one of those weird compliments where there's an implied put-down of previous stuff.

We've heard a lot of that. And, you know, if that needs to be said in order to prick up someone's ears and say, "I'll have to revisit this band," then I don't think we can complain about it....I think this record is stronger. I'm thankful that it turned out to be a more aggressive record.

Was there a particular song that set the template for everything else?

We played music for about five days with all these discussions about all these arrangements and whatever. And at the end of the five days we had probably like ten pieces of music. And then on the sixth day I asked for the room to myself and just like belted it out over the ten pieces of music. In, literally, a day and a half or something I pretty much had most of the melodies down for the first ten songs. And we ended up writing forty other pieces of music. And it all kept getting [pared down]. That's another reason why it ended up being aggressive. It wasn't that we tried to write all aggressive songs -- it's just the ones that were kind of mid-tempo, we left them behind.

Yeah. And you worked hard on the lyrics? Unusually hard, from what I understand.

Well, it wasn't that I set out to work hard on them. Because it's not always hard. And it should be easy. If you connect with the idea and the light hits you in the forehead, you get it on the typewriter, you get it on the eight-track machine in front of you -- your little portable machine -- then sometimes it can go quick. The hard part was just sticking at it for, you know, it could be eight days for one song until the fucking beam hits you between the eyes and then you're ready. You're ready to capture it. You need the patience of like a National Geographic photographer sitting underneath the bush in a tent, trying to get a picture of zebras fucking or something for the first time. [Laughs] For some reason, a lot of the songs I wrote eight versions until I got the right one, or until it was like up to the standards of what the Earth's atmosphere is demanding for music. And it needed that, or I'd figure out after eight, nine or eleven drafts that the first one was actually the one.

When I think of you at fifty, I still can imagine Pearl Jam being together. Can you?

Yeah, yeah. That's not hard to do.

You've never even temporarily broken up, not that you've told anyone at least.

Right. I mean, at the end of every tour you basically break up. You just keep it to yourself. Then you can relieve yourself of the pressure, and right about the time you feel like playing music again, you think, "Well, there's not a better bunch of guys to do it with."

After all this time, you still haven't done your own solo project.

I think it's just because...I am so fucking beat at the end of...the amount of communication it takes to be on the road and the amount of physical...I don't know who said it...someone said like, "I play the shows for free; they pay me to travel." And Flea and I were talking about that the other day. We started laughing about it hysterically, because we were just in that mode, you know. I've recorded a bunch of stuff just for myself, and I've done a number of benefits for kids by myself because it's easier for me to get there than the whole group and kind of make a bit of a difference. Also, I've had some real genuine offers to collaborate with a few people here and there in our off time. That's kept me pretty busy. And I think too, during that time when you're not functioning as one of the limbs of the group and having to be in motion with each other at all times, that off time, that's when you kind of get away from everything and refill everything that you've emptied out and kind of get your soul back. You remind yourself what's it's like to be a regular human being and not be part of the band. Any one of our guys will tell you that. We're proud to be in it and we're proud to come together. But you're talking about five extremely different individuals who don't define themselves by being in this group. It's what it will say in the paper when we die, but it's not how we define ourselves.