“I think our new stuff definitely stands up to the old stuff, but it’s always going to be different without Layne. He was such an identifiable part of everything,” Inez says. “I think Layne would’ve loved our new material. If he was still here, it probably would’ve sounded different, but you can’t think like that. We still think about him every single day, and we’re so gracious, humbled and blessed to know that we got a second chance at this. We take it very, very seriously.”
Alice in Chains’ fifth studio album, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here, hit the shelves in May and gave us the trademark sludge and haunting harmonies we’ve come to know and love from the foursome, but Inez says that after being on the road for a few months, the new material is already becoming more fully-formed than cuts from the record.
“I think our new songs come out heavier live – especially Hollow and Stone. There’s just something about that live energy that makes that happen. Being in the studio is like being trapped in a fish tank for a year. You barely get to see a window with any sunlight coming through. It’s a completely different experience to when you’re playing in front of 88,000 people at Rock in Rio.
“I’ve always been of the belief that all songs sound better live. When I’m at home, I’m usually listening to bootlegs. I remember hearing an interview with Joan Jett when I was a kid where she said that the whole process is backwards – you make a record and then you go on the road and spend the next two years playing those songs live. By the end of the tour, you’re finally playing the music in the way it should’ve been recorded in the first place. I’ve always thought there was a logic in what she said.”
With such a legacy preceding Alice in Chains’ current chapter, it would be easy to fall into the trap of many other rock veterans by molding their sound into one that is expected of them. Inez says that this is something the band was aware of at first, but it hasn’t influenced their songwriting process.
“We used to overthink stuff like that, but now we just keep it simple. I always tell the rest of the band that at the end of the day, we’re just four fucking guys in a room making a racket. I’ve seen a lot of other bands in the studio crippling themselves by trying to write songs for all the wrong reasons. But whether you’re in a high school band or you’re in Alice in Chains, you should just be true to yourselves. When I’m standing in a room next to William with the amp cranked up, looking up at Jerry and waiting for Shaun to count off the song, the result is just four guys with four different personalities jamming. It’s going to come out the way it should. We don’t listen to record label guys coming in and telling us what we should do, or how the record should sound. We just go in and jam.
“Even on this last record, I was playing the same basses that I was playing on Jar of Flies. There were a couple of new amps here and there, but for the most part, we just operate the same way we always have, and we have faith that it will turn out ok.”
Jar of Flies is almost an anomaly in Alice in Chains’ dark, heavy back catalogue – mostly acoustic in tone with more of a reliance on vocals and strings for melody than hefty riffage. Inez hints that the band’s next effort could head in a similar direction.
“We could be due a Jar of Flies album actually. Another acoustic record would be amazing. Jar of Flies was written, recorded, mixed and mastered in ten days. It was nice to do a record like that – it was very free-spirited. So who knows, we could do that again.
“But it’s hard to say – I always look at albums like the part of the pier that hits the water. They are just watermarks of where we were at when we went in the studio. In those months, that’s just what came out of the amps. I see music as a living, breathing thing. An album is just what was birthed at that particular point.”
BY CALLUM FITZPATRICK
