Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard finds his own voice with Bayleaf

For a workaholic, Stone Gossard looks pretty languid, noontime on this Monday; he's a mellow Midas, this musician with the golden (or is it platinum?) touch. The Pearl Jam-Brad-Bayleaf guitarist's brown hair is jutting haphazardly from underneath a visor. He is wearing a dark sweatshirt and shorts, and is sporting new facial hair and stylish eyeglasses that you might see on a dot-commer.

If he looks like a start-up artist, perhaps it's because he is one — though in the music world, not the tech world. Gossard has helped launch the legendary Green River (which also featured Mark Arm and Steve Turner, who would go on to form Mudhoney), the monstrously popular Pearl Jam and the off-and-on side project Brad. Now he's starting up another band: Bayleaf.

This, by the way, is the veteran musician's first shot as a lead singer.

"I'm excited about it," he says quietly but firmly, sipping tea at a cafe near his Madrona home. "I started singing in the studio about four years ago. ... It's been a lot of stops and starts since then."

Asked if he sought advice from Brad singer Shawn Smith or Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder on singing technique and vocal exercises, Gossard chuckles. "Those guys are both like the anti-exercise gods. They both find whatever they're feeling and go toward it. ... It's a pursuit of honesty."

Trying to find his own emotional honesty, Seattle native Gossard sings lead on seven of the 10 songs on the album "Bayleaf," which goes to record stores Sept. 11 (it's available for downloading at www.stonegossard.com). On the song "Bayleaf," which Gossard wrote a few years ago and was the genesis of this project, he sounds quite a bit like Neil Young — which Gossard readily acknowledges.

"His voice inspired me to feel comfortable with the kind of voice I have. ... My voice tends to want to crack, and tends to want to sound nasally."

Gossard, who last month turned 35 but looks a bit younger, also wrote all the songs on "Bayleaf," the first time he has explored writing. "I'm just starting to look at words," says Gossard, whose life has been led by music for 20 years. Lately, he has been enchanted by the idea that "words can have the same kind of magic as riffs can."

Though Gossard plays all the instruments — guitar, drums, bass — on the song "Pigeon," Bayleaf is not a solo project. Ty Wilman sings lead on three of the songs, and Seattle musician Pete Droge, drummers Mike Stone and Matt Chamberlin (who did a brief stint with Pearl Jam in 1991) and piano player Ron Weinstein play on the album.

While he is excited about Bayleaf, Gossard is not quitting his day job, with Pearl Jam. Except for a few benefit shows, such as the Groundwork world-hunger benefit in Seattle in October (Pearl Jam plays at KeyArena on Oct. 22, sharing the bill with Alanis Morissette and R.E.M.), Pearl Jam has been on sabbatical for 2001. Gossard says the band will get together in January and talk about its next recording.

Meanwhile, Brad is making a bit of a comeback, with Gossard and Smith recording new material and playing the Breakroom Room on Sept. 1-3, the first Brad show in three years.

"Shawn's kind of the go-to guy with that," Gossard says of Brad. "I'm more of a player in that. Whoever's singing has to feel supported," he adds with a smile.

Though he insists that when he finished the Bayleaf album, "I definitely didn't play for a couple of months," it's hard to imagine Gossard sitting still for long. In recent years, he launched a small record label called Loosegroove; it proved to be too time-consuming for Gossard, and has since merged with Will Records.

Gossard says he simply found that he liked being a musician much more than a businessman.

"I like to play music," he says. "I like projects. I like excuses to hang out with my friends and play music."

Asked what he would be doing, had he been been raised somewhere else, Gossard pauses for just a moment. "On some planet, I probably could have been a lawyer. On some planet, I could have been somebody in advertising."

On planet Earth, his music-rich Seattle environment led him to music; he recalls going to Capitol Hill's alternative high school, the Northwest School, "and watching all my friends playing acoustic guitars in the hallway. ...

"I picked up a guitar, and I knew what I wanted to do."