Pearl Jam Guitarist Mike McCready Featured on Teen’s Covid-inspired Song

Jack West, the 15-year-old singer/songwriter/guitarist from Rochester, N.Y., has already been adopted by Pearl Jam fans for the time he performed on-stage in Nashville at an Eddie Vedder solo show just a few short years ago before 30,000 people. His new single, “Missing Out,” which Jack wrote last January, but then adjusted its apocalyptic tone to the pandemic which followed, features a couple of searing guitar solos from none other than Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready.

“I really feel they fit the song well,” says West, who has been making the best of his time during the pandemic, writing and recording in both New York City with bandmates and on his own in Seattle.

Legendary Seattle-based producer/engineer Barrett Jones, who worked on West’s 2019 debut album, For the Record, helped enlist McCready for the new single. Jones is a longtime fixture on the city’s rock scene as founder of the famed Laundry Room Studios, which he started in Washington, DC, where he was childhood friends with Dave Grohl, who urged Barrett to join him in Seattle in 1991 at the start of the city’s fabled grunge explosion. Jones ended up serving as Grohl’s drum tech while the drummer was in Nirvana, remixing Pearl Jam’s live bootlegs and tour managing Brad, Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard’s side project, while playing with both him and McCready.

Jones says McCready “loved the song” and offered to provide the solos. “It can only help Jack get noticed having Mike on the record,” he says. “McCready raised the level of the song, adding a really good vibe.”.

Pearl Jam fans are already aware of West from his appearance last year at Seattle’s famed indie retail store Easy Street Records, recording an EP, digital and vinyl release, Live at Easy Street Records, which featured a cover of Audioslave’s “Like a Stone,” his tribute to the late Chris Cornell. Not included on the LP was the set-closing encore, a spirited run-through of the Neil Young/Pearl Jam classic, “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Coincidentally, Pearl Jam released their own Live at Easy Street EP for last year’s Record Store Day from an in-store performance at the retailer in April, 2005.

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