Perry Farrell was done waiting. In 2010, the Jane's Addiction singer watched his band stall when founding bassist Eric Avery walked away rather than record another album. Farrell's response was blunt: he said Avery did not want to record, so they cut him out of the equation because they could not live without making music. The alternative rock band from Los Angeles had not made a studio album since Strays in 2003, and the silence had lasted long enough. McKagan later described the new songs as very cool, very heavy, and in the spirit of Pink Floyd. Jane's Addiction released The Great Escape Artist on October 18, 2011.
A revolving door of bassists
What followed was a strange, stopgap year. Duff McKagan of Guns N' Roses and Velvet Revolver joined for nine months, wrote songs, and played live, but by September 2010 he was gone too—Farrell noted that McKagan did not like the idea of using electronics. The real jolt came from a different direction: Dave Sitek, the producer and multi-instrumentalist from TV on the Radio, began writing and playing bass during the sessions. Sitek never became a permanent member; Farrell compared him to a pretty girl he could sleep with but was not obligated to marry.
The recording process itself was fractured and futuristic. Farrell recorded his vocals in a home studio and emailed the audio files to guitarist Dave Navarro, drummer Stephen Perkins, and Sitek. The band traded tracks back and forth, deconstructed demos, and leaned on electronics to find fresh sounds. Navarro simplified his guitar playing, aiming for melody over distortion, and said the work on The Great Escape Artist became one of the most pleasant journeys he'd had in years.
The album finally arrived on October 18, 2011, on Capitol Records. It was the band's fourth studio album and their first in eight years, a hard-rock and art-rock record. Tracks like "Underground," "End to the Lies," and "Curiosity Kills" showed the band trying to fuse their post-punk gothic darkness with the modern sweep of Muse and Radiohead—a comparison Farrell made himself.
Divided reviews and a quick chart drop
Reviews were sharply divided. Metacritic's aggregate score landed at 55 out of 100, based on 26 critics. Some outlets were brutal—Pitchfork gave it a 5.0, PopMatters a 3 out of 10—while NME handed out an 8 and AllMusic a 3.5 out of 5. The commercial response was just as mixed: the album entered the Billboard 200 at number 12 before falling to 67 in its second week.
Yet the story behind The Great Escape Artist is less about chart positions than about a band refusing to stay stuck. Chris Chaney, who had played bass on previous Jane's Addiction work, returned to record bass parts and tour behind the album. Navarro called him the only bassist who had recorded a full-length album with the group and a member of the family. The revolving door of bassists—Avery, McKagan, Sitek, Chaney—became a central drama of the album's creation. Farrell also said the group had enough material for three albums, a sign of the creative burst that accompanied the sessions. The album's total running time was thirty-nine minutes and fifty-four seconds, a compact statement of intent.
Farrell explained the title as a personal philosophy: he loved escaping his past, even if it was great, and loved the future even more. For a band founded in the mid-1980s, that meant using technology not as a gimmick but as a way to break old habits. The Great Escape Artist was messy, uneven, and sometimes brilliant—but it proved Jane's Addiction could still make new music when everyone else thought they were finished.