Sadler Vaden Recalls When Mike McCready Joined Jason Isbell on a “Little Wing” Cover in Seattle

When Jason Isbell decided to close a sold-out night at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre with a Jimi Hendrix cover, he didn’t just pick a song. He invited Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready to walk onstage and take it somewhere else. Sadler Vaden, lead guitarist in the 400 Unit, still talks about it like it just happened.

In a new interview with Music Radar, Vaden revisited the four-year-old memory. The decision to cover “Little Wing” already carried weight. “It’s Jimi Hendrix, right?” he said. “Do you even do something like this?” Then McCready stepped up with his Stratocaster. Vaden recalls watching him turn every knob on the amplifier all the way up before his solo. “It was great,” he said, laughing at the sheer nerve of it.

The performance unfolded at a venue that sits deep in McCready’s own hometown circuit. For Isbell’s band, it was a rare collision of two worlds. There was no rehearsal, no safety net, just a shared history with the song and a stage full of people who understood the stakes. Vaden’s account doesn’t romanticize the night. He describes the tension of having to honor Hendrix while standing next to a guitarist whose sound defined a different era of rock.

The story surfaces now because Vaden has been circling the memory while working on his own music. The interview touches on his solo career, but this moment from 2019 remains a benchmark. It captures what happens when an invitation extended without overthinking turns into a piece of stage lore that no one involved has forgotten.