JERRY CANTRELL: "You can look at my history and you know where my f**kin’ heart lies"

The Alice in Chains icon wants blood. And with his darker, heavier new solo album, he might just get it.

The universe of heavy music is forever in flux, evolving in surprising ways not just from the rise of new voices, but also in who is listening. A case in point showed itself without much warning at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, where the French metal band Gojira played a prominent role at the opening ceremonies. In July, the band was broadcast around the globe from the medieval Conciergerie palace, where Marie Antoinette was once imprisoned and sentenced to death, to perform the 19th-century French anthem “Ah! Ça Ira” amid pillars of fire and several decapitated Antoinettes singing along from the windows.

It was raging and uncompromising metal, right there on the bank of the Seine river, where the whole world could watch. Back in the United States, guitarist Jerry Cantrell took notice.

“I thought that it was a cool, surprising choice,” Cantrell says, then adds with a laugh, “It was also interesting to see Snoop Dogg carrying the torch when they’re so concerned with doping. That dude’s like the stoner from hell! I love Snoop, but I was like, Holy shit, they’re cool with dope now? They’re cool with heavy metal? Maybe times are changing for the better.”

Not everything requires a revolutionary change, of course. And for Cantrell, the moment of creation is the same as it ever was. These days, that usually means a living-room jam with friends who just happen to be highly accomplished players of hard rock — but the feeling is no different from the hours he used to spend as a young guitarist in a garage or converted bedroom back in Seattle.

The Alice in Chains guitarist can clearly remember his earliest days in rooms like that, “where you’d go over and smoke joints and listen to Rush records and try to play along with your buddy with half a drum kit, and you’ve got a crappy guitar, trying to learn songs together. I like that element of it.”

Now in living rooms at his homes in Los Angeles or Seattle, Cantrell and his group of players will plug into some small amplifiers and pedals, an electronic drum kit, put on headphones and cut loose. Sitting beside him could be any one or more of the usual suspects: bassists Duff McKagan (Guns N’ Roses) and Robert Trujillo (Metallica), drummers Gil Sharone (Marilyn Manson, former Dillinger Escape Plan) and Mike Bordin (Faith No More), and composer-guitarist Tyler Bates.

That’s how a song that would become “Let It Lie” came to life one day. The completed track — as it appears on Cantrell’s new solo album, I Want Blood — has a dark and ominous sound that Cantrell now describes as “sludgy as fuck.” The song ultimately evolves into an epic of growling guitars, with a prog middle section and big rock solo, and a seething Cantrell vocal: “Everybody has a spell they’re under/Beneath a primal urge to fight/Can you see yourself in the other?”

To Cantrell, it was reminiscent of early Soundgarden, a massive, bleak rock tune echoing the earliest days of grunge he knew so well. But it began just as another accidental moment of inspiration between some heavy-rock dudes hanging out in a living room.

“We were just doing a free-form jam, and I stumbled onto that riff,” Cantrell recalls. Then Bates responded with something else, “and I reacted to that. He just looked at me like, That’s cool.”

“I love the next phase, which is going to a kick-ass studio and doing it right,” he adds. “But I like keeping it a little lo-fi in the jam phase, in the demo phase. There’s something really cool about that to me.”

Cantrell is on the phone from the road, heading toward a concert date in Utah. The release of I Want Blood is still months away, so the nightly setlist is filled mostly with songs from his three previous solo records and various Alice in Chains classics, plus the new single, “Vilified.” He just woke up a little while ago, but is eager to talk about his new album, which features another all-star cast of musicians, much like 2021’s Brighten.

That record had a prominent co-vocalist role played by former Dillinger Escape Plan singer Greg Puciato, who also makes an appearance on I Want Blood. But Brighten was Cantrell’s first solo project in 19 years.

During that long stretch of time, he had been focused mostly on resurrecting Alice in Chains, the grunge-era multi-platinum act whose career was cut short by the tragic death of singer Layne Staley in 2002. Their comeback had been a success, starting with 2009’s Black Gives Way to Blue. Like AC/DC before them, it was a rare case of a rock band successfully carrying on after the death of a dynamic frontman, as the record went gold and hit No. 5 on the Billboard 200. Two more albums later with singer William DuVall, Alice in Chains is fully reestablished as an active touring and recording unit, and this year performed at the high-profile Sick New World festival in Las Vegas.

With Alice back on solid ground — and after the three-year cycle of writing, recording and touring for their 2018 album Rainier Fog — Cantrell had some downtime on his hands and returned to the solo career he began with 1998’s Boggy Depot (which was followed by Degradation Trip in 2002). The singer-guitarist stretched out in new ways on 2021’s Brighten — a collection of hard rock and wounded ballads that included a few twangy echoes of Ennio Morricone.

“I was fired up after that experience,” Cantrell says now. “I felt like I maybe wanted to get to work a little bit quicker and maybe do another one while I had the time and the opportunity.”

What emerges in the songs of I Want Blood is something heavier. The menacing “Vilified” opens the album with layers of massive, swirling guitar, a thundering Trujillo bassline and Sharone drumbeat, and Cantrell’s sneering vocal: “Heya schadenfreude crescendo/A.I. skew the innuendo.” Elsewhere, the tracks “Off the Rails” and “Throw Me a Line” deliver weighty, slippery riffs and the kind of memorable rock hooks he’s been creating since the earliest days of Alice in Chains.

The nine-song album was recorded earlier this year with production by Cantrell and Joe Barresi. Sessions unfolded amid the red brick walls and loads of vintage gear at Barresi’s JHOC Studio (a.k.a. Joe’s House of Compression) in Pasadena, California. “You walk into his studio and it’s like 10 Guitar Centers all crammed into one, [filled] with the last 50 years of gear,” Cantrell explains of collaborating with the producer, known for his work with a startling roster of major acts, including TOOL, Slipknot and Queens of the Stone Age.

The brooding “Echoes of Laughter” began as a riff that Bates had been playing whenever they got together. Bates, acclaimed for his work as a soundtrack composer and a producer for Marilyn Manson, HEALTH and Starcrawler, was also Cantrell’s main creative partner on Brighten. And when it came time to tour behind the record, Bates joined him on the road. It was on that tour that this riff kept coming up — at soundchecks and in dressing rooms, then again during jam sessions in Cantrell’s living room or at Bates’ place. (While Bates wasn’t able to participate on most of I Want Blood, his daughter Lola Colette sings backup on several tracks.)

“This record has a few riffs that have been cycling around for a while. Like, ‘I’m looking for a home. I’m a good riff, where are you gonna put me?’” Cantrell says with a chuckle. “We were up at my place, and [Tyler] started dinking around. I’m like, ‘You keep playing that, man. Let’s make something out of that.’”

They began recording as Bates played the riff once more. Cantrell picked up his guitar to play a counterpoint against that, and a song was finally sketched out. Later, they reconvened to record a better demo version of what they’d created, this time with drum machine and effects.

“We get it all mocked up and ready to go, and he hands me the guitar. I’m like, ‘Dude, you played it. You came up with it,’” Cantrell recalls. “That piece of music is pretty much exclusively — front to back — written by Tyler. I put a couple of little flourishes in there, and then I wrote the lyrics. But it’s a really emotional, cinematic tune. It touches on the beauty and also the finiteness of life. All our moments end — but there’s a lot of beautiful moments in the story, from beginning to end. That song touches on that theme a little bit: celebrating and also letting go.”

Supported by background vocals from Puciato, Cantrell responded to the music with lyrics of loss: “Laid you down, let go, a flower in the sun/Rumble from above, the transfer had begun/Not gonna see ya or hold you close again.”

“It’s a very common human experience,” Cantrell notes. When it comes to lyrics, he explains, his words tend to be based largely on personal history or human moments he’s witnessed in others. It’s never been easy.

“I agonize over it, and it’s the fucking worst part,” he admits with a laugh. “It’s awesome when you’re done, but it’s so fucking frustrating. And it always comes last in the process — you have the music first, and then, OK, now what the hell am I gonna say? I can totally take this great piece of music and fuck it up real quick by writing something stupid.”

But, he continues, “You have to allow yourself to fuck up. You have to allow yourself the space to make some mistakes — and get in there and work on something until it starts to take shape. A lot of the times I don’t really even know what the hell the thing is until I’m done. And even then, sometimes I’m like, Where did that come from? I think good lyric writing, number one, it’s gotta be personal. You have to start with yourself and your own emotions, your own feelings, your own observations.”

In one example, for the song “Let It Lie,” Cantrell unloads a snarling vocal as cutting as the guitars. “That’s a personal-relationship lyric. You can plug and play whichever relationship you have in your life with somebody that you butt heads with — but fuckin’ love to death at the same time,” he explains.

For Cantrell, inspiration can come from many places. An hour or two before this interview, he was reading an article about guitar hero Joe Walsh, in which he describes writing the lyrics to his 1973 hit “Rocky Mountain Way.” “He was completely blocked, and the band’s like, ‘Dude, we need some lyrics,’” Cantrell relates from the interview. “So, he just started going stream of consciousness. He’s standing and he’s looking at the Rocky Mountains — like, ‘Spent the last year/Rocky Mountain way/Couldn’t get much higher.’ And then, the whole, ‘He’s telling us this, he’s telling us that’ is his manager who called.”

Cantrell explains that Walsh was one of many players from the classic-rock era that left a mark on him. “James Gang, solo career, Eagles — I love that dude. That guy is a great songwriter, great singer. Excellent guitar player. Tone for days. Joe Walsh is high on my personal list for sure.”

He also recalls being an impressionable kid and hearing Walsh’s 1978 autobiographical “Life’s Been Good” single on the radio, with its stories of parties, limos, Maseratis and rock-star decadence (“I live in hotels, tear out the walls/I have accountants pay for it all”). That all sounded good to Cantrell, who ended up having some similar experiences a decade or two later as a member of a hit-making hard-rock band. “I’ve lived a few of those stories. And even if I haven’t lived them personally, I’ve been standing next to somebody who did,” he says. “So, I was at the scene of the crime.”

On I Want Blood, some of Cantrell’s lyrics are laid bare during “Held Your Tongue,” as he sings the entire opening verse a cappella. From the earliest Alice recordings, Cantrell had been a key ingredient in the band’s vocal sound, his lines blending with Staley’s to create an intense and instantly recognizable style. As the band and his solo records rolled on, that style has remained. But singing without accompaniment, even if only for a verse, suggests Cantrell’s increasing confidence as a vocalist.

“I felt like I was operating at the top of my abilities as a singer, for sure. I think I’m growing. I’m trying to get more consistent at everything. That’s the goal,” he says, “whether it’s playing guitar, whether it’s singing, whether it’s songwriting, whether it’s producing, whether it’s working and playing well with others.

“You’re trying to get as consistent as you can, so that when the inevitable ups and downs happen, at least you have a baseline to go back to. On the last record, I felt like it took a step up. I feel like it took another step up on this, vocally especially.”

The album closes with an epic, “It Comes,” which unfolds with a dreamy guitar pattern and another elegant classic-rock guitar solo, before ending with an extended single note — not unlike the piano chord that concludes the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” For Cantrell, though, the song echoes his appreciation for Pink Floyd and their iconic guitarist David Gilmour.

During the recording session, Cantrell had a sudden moment of inspiration and pressed his face close to his guitar’s single pickup and shouted the immortal Floyd line from “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2”: “How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” A close listen reveals something of that vocal bit in the song’s final moments. Cantrell recalls, “I just screamed it into my guitar because I was in the vibe, and I just thought it was funny.”

Though his love for Pink Floyd runs deep — and the example Gilmour set as an essential guitar hero is profound — he’s never had a chance to meet the man. “I’d like to hang out with that dude for a couple hours someday,” he says. “At the very least.”

“I love Gilmour. And I love Floyd,” he continues. “They’re a big band for me. I didn’t sit down intending to have that flavor come out, but it just naturally did. I think that song has a little bit of shimmer and little elements of my appreciation for Floyd. You can’t touch those guys. I put Gilmour in my top five of guitar players that I admire and respect.”

As Cantrell rolled across the U.S. for his summer tour, most of what he’d created on I Want Blood would have to be kept under wraps, with the exception of “Vilified.” In the Nineties, Alice in Chains would sometimes road-test new songs destined for upcoming records — but that was the era before smartphones, and fans sharing hi-def video of an entire show from the night before on YouTube.

That was not an issue back when they would test songs like “Would?” and “Rooster” — other than the occasional bootlegger sneaking a tape recorder into a show, and maybe plugging into the soundboard. It was a select few that heard those scratchy recordings anyway.

“Generally, I like people to hear the best version of the song first — instead of some crappy version off of somebody’s phone,” Cantrell says. “And then it’s all right to have the flood of videos and stuff like that. That’s maybe altered how I go about doing things, and probably a lot of [other] artists, too.”

Cantrell doesn’t spend much time looking backward, he says. But the guitarist does see himself as part of a continuum of music — picking up from the classic rockers he grew up with, creating his own sound, and paying it forward.

“I’m part of a community that was handed to me,” he says. “And then I’ve been able to hand that off to other people, other generations of musicians, and see them pick up that baton and go fuckin’ run their race — and then they’ll hand it to somebody else. It’s a fuckin’ cool thing to do. It’s a noble effort, you know?”

Cantrell will be focused on his new music and touring with his solo band well into 2025. He’s excited to be there — but a return to Alice in Chains is inevitable, even if there are no specific plans in place following last April’s Sick New World gig.

“At some point we’re going to be out there rocking again,” he says. “I don’t know exactly when that’s going to be, but when the right opportunity presents itself or we decide, ‘Hey, let’s do this,’ then we’ll do it.

“It’s nice to be able to do both. You can look at my history and you know where my fuckin’ heart lies — it’s on my sleeve. I live, breathe and eat Alice, and I love the guys. I love being in the band. [But] occasionally it’s good to get out of the boat and go take a swim on your own. It’s a healthy thing. The boat is always right there and you can swim back to it. That remains the case for all of us.”

Exploring a solo career has been an inspiring place to be these last few years, he says, even as Alice remains an ongoing commitment. “Follow your gut, be yourself. You do those two things and, win or lose, you’re going to be fine,” Cantrell concludes. “That’s the motto that we’ve always operated on. No matter what I’m doing, I try to start from those two places: Fucking trust your gut, fucking bet on yourself.”

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