Stone Gossard and Mason Jennings have been slowly building something weird and beautiful for six years without really knowing why. “We did ‘Knife Fight’ and it sounded great, and we were off and running,” says Gossard, almost surprised it worked at all. Painted Shield, their collaboration, sounds like two guys accidentally inventing a new genre out of leftover demos and sheer luck. “It was like point and shoot,” says Gossard. “Just go, I don’t know, this never really got anywhere, but I still like it.” You get the sense that if it had gone terribly wrong, they wouldn’t have been that shocked.
Mason Jennings wasn’t sure how to collaborate at first. He’d spent most of his career playing solo, controlling every chord and vocal take, and suddenly he had to let other people—gasp—do things. “You have to let go of some stuff that I’m used to being able to control,” he admits. “That was a good lesson to learn.” Turns out, when you let people like Matt Chamberlain and Brittany Davis take the wheel, the ride gets a lot more interesting. “She’s singing all the harmonies I would normally have to cover, and she’s doing it better than me,” Jennings says. “I’m like, oh god, this is so cool to hear back.”
Chamberlain’s presence in the band is still a little surreal for Gossard. “Matt’s a powerhouse drummer,” he says, giving off serious fanboy vibes. “If you saw him playing in a room, your jaw would drop.” This is a guy who’s played with everyone from Bob Dylan to Pearl Jam for about half a day. “It was a bad era,” Gossard deadpans. “He had many more stars to play with.”
The weirdness didn’t stop when they handed the record over to producer John Congleton. “We were just like, do whatever you want,” says Gossard. “He’d take parts we thought were main parts and turn them off, then turn up some random scratch track from the beginning. At first, I was like, is this even our record anymore? Then a week later, I was like, oh my god, thank you.”
It wasn’t all happy accidents and outsider genius, though. Some of it came from real-world grief. Jennings turned to songwriting to cope with his own divorce and the fallout from George Floyd’s murder, which he witnessed from his home in Minneapolis. “I was just singing for myself,” he says about “I Am Your Country,” which unexpectedly became the album’s first single. “I thought the record was done, and Stone was like, dude, that’s the first track. I was like, what the hell?”
The whole project is a bizarre balancing act between spontaneity and intention. Even Gossard seems confused about how it came together. “I’m a pack rat,” he admits. “I’ve got hundreds of incomplete sketches just lying around.” But rather than sorting through them like a responsible artist, he’d just shoot Jennings a few random tracks and see what stuck. Turns out, some of it really stuck.
For Gossard, this weird side project is also an excuse to bring back Loosegroove Records, his old label. He and Regan Hagar are plotting an onslaught of new releases, including a lost punk album from Duff McKagan. “It’s like opening a time capsule from 1982,” says Gossard. There’s also new music from Brittany Davis and, hopefully, more Painted Shield records. “If they don’t leave me,” Gossard jokes.
The most confusing part might be how this project fits into Gossard’s life as a Pearl Jam guitarist. After two years of not playing a single gig, he’s starting to worry his fingers forgot how to work. “I’ve had dreams about it,” he says, describing his fear of standing on stage like an idiot while the band kicks into a song he’s completely forgotten. Not that he’s sweating it too much. At this point, he’s accepted that not everything has to be meticulously planned or even make sense.
“New songs, best songs,” he laughs. “That’s always the game, right?” The way he says it, you’d think he was talking about the whole damn project. Turns out Painted Shield is the result of throwing a bunch of random ideas into the air and being just surprised enough when they fall into place.
Watch the interview above and then check out the tracks below.
