Jerry Cantrell the man best known for his work in Alice In Chains releases his fourth solo album “I Want Blood” on October 18. I was lucky enough to catch a listen to the album before speaking with the man himself. We dive into the album, discuss his love of rock n roll, his writing process and what inspired a different take on the songs that will be available on the deluxe vinyl only release of the album. Sit back and enjoy the read.
Andrew : Hey Jerry,
Jerry : This meeting is being recorded ……. Apparently? (laughs)
Andrew : It is, is that alright?
Jerry : Yeah man. How you doing? (laughs)
Andrew : I’m great man, welcome to The Rockpit. Thanks for taking time out of your schedule to chat with us. First of all, I want to congratulate you on the new album “I Want Blood” which is out October 18 via Double J music.
Jerry : Yeah it is and I can’t wait for it come out.
Andrew : I guess I’m blessed in some ways and cursed in others. I only got to hear the album for the first time about five hours ago, so I’m still digesting a lot of it, but I am loving what I hear in its initial three or four plays for me. The first single and video “Vilified” was a great introduction to this album. Was “I Want Blood” something that came as further inspiration from “Brighten”?
Jerry : The two are definitely separate records and pieces of work. They’re not really connected in any way, except for the fact that I don’t really get the opportunity to do this very often. You know, I’ve been in and I’ve been with Alice In Chains since 1987, that’s what, thirty, thirty-seven years or whatever. So, out of those thirty-seven I’ve taken six to make two records. Before “Brighten” I hadn’t done one a solo record in twenty years and because I hadn’t done it in a while it was kind of all fresh and new to me again and I really enjoyed the experience. The band was great and I had a lot of fun making that record and especially touring it all over the world. I got home and I generally like to take time off to just kind of recoup and reflect before I figure out what I want to do next. But that didn’t happen this time. I went into demo and writing mode pretty quickly after I got home. I just felt inspired to do another one, you know you’ve got to trust your gut and follow where that leads you. That’s been working pretty good for me most of my life. I feel like it was the right thing to do to jump into another record and strike while the iron’s hot so to speak.
Andrew : With “I Want Blood” you co-produced with Joe Barresi. Joe and yourself have a bit of a working relationship and history, which I think what started with Rainier Fog, the Alice in Chains record.
Jerry : Yeah, that’s right. He also mixed my last solo album “Brighten”.
Andrew : On “Brighten” and “Rainier Fog”, was his capacity more as someone who just mixed and wasn’t as involved in the production of it? Or was that something through your friendship with him felt right to do this time?
Jerry : Well, you know, when I did “Brighten” I did that with my partner Tyler Bates and he also helped me put together the band that we toured and came on tour with us as well. So, you know, Tyler and I were kind of partners on that and my long-time buddy Paul Figaro was the engineer on that record. Joe Breezy mixed it and he also had mixed “Rainier Fog” I should point out. But I knew that Paul and Tyler both were kind of committed to other projects in the window in which I was gonna make my record. So, I had to find somebody else to co-produce with me. I talked to Joe about it and he was in, I played him a few of the things that I was working on and I think by the second song he was like i’m totally in let’s do this. That was great and it is a little bit different, you know, mixing the record is one thing and he’s really good at that. But if you’re going to go from the ground up from the demo phase to pre-production to recording, then mixing, that’s a much bigger endeavour. He’s just a great guy to work with. We think alike on a lot of things. We’re both big fans of rock and roll and we’re trying to make the best, best work that we can when we make records. I think it was a good team and I still had some help and some advice here and there from Tyler Bates, who’s also another guy that I really lean on for ideas and to give me a clean balance on stuff once in a while. It turned out great, I’m really proud of the record, I think it’s a really rocking record. I just got off a couple of months on the road touring where I was playing ‘Vilified’ and ‘Afterglow’ every night. It was great seeing that people’s response to a couple of new songs, and in a couple more days the whole thing will be out.
Andrew : I’m glad that you mentioned ‘Afterglow’ and that it was added to the recent live set, for me on these first few listens, that is the track that stood out, at this stage it is the standout track for me. It’s the track that I found something really special in. Tell me a little bit about that track because it’s an interesting one to me. I like the whole vibe around it.
Jerry : Sure. Well, I agree with you, I agree with you that it’s one of the more instant songs it’s just delicious from the first beat, you know, and it’s a really great landscape, it’s really rich and the soundscape is pretty amazing. The lyrical content tells a really interesting story. It’s funny that vocal, it’s a really great vocal. I remember when we were in mix mode, we already had thought we had that song finished and I’d done a great vocal for it, but Joe was like, man, you know what? I think you can do better. I was like, dude, we’re mixing the record, we’re done. He’s like, no, no, no, no, no, go in there and just give it another shot. Just for me, go in and just do a couple of takes, you know? We set up the mic, like, I think we can top it, it’s really good right now, but I think you can top it. He set me up in the room and I sang it once, there might be a one take, one take vocal there, or two takes at the most and he was right. It turned out to be a better vocal, so you know the record’s never over until it’s actually over. Just that last little move put a little bit more edge and a little bit more emotion into it and the performance.
Andrew : While we are talking about vocal performances that opening vocal performance on ‘Held Your Tongue’, which is just a single track vocal what was the idea behind that? To me is so cool because it’s still very, very you, but took away some of the familiarity from the Alice in Chains sound that has become an instant identifier.
Jerry : It’s interesting to start a heavy rock song with an acapella vocal, I’m not the first person to do it, but what I really like about it is you don’t quite know where it’s going to go. You might have an idea by that single vocal that it might be a certain type of song and then it kicks in. It’s a little bit of a surprise when it does and it might go to a musical place where you might not think it will on first listen. I like little surprises like that in music. Severe down shifts and left turns and right turns, I love music like that, It’s very interesting to me. I try to do that wherever I can, wherever it feels natural to do something like that where it adds drama to the story, storytelling and if you’re on first listen and you’re surprising people in a couple of different spots that’s a good thing, the story just doesn’t stay the same.
Andrew : For sure. That’s how I found the song. I was intrigued by it, it’s so different and then, it turns into a no hold barred rock song; it’s fantastic. It really is.
Jerry : It is very much a rock song (laughs).
Andrew : When it comes to writing riffs for an album like this. I would imagine that you like most people these days use their phone or whatever to record a riff or an idea. To have the ability to capture an idea at any time or place whether it comes in the middle of the night or while you’re warming up to play a show. How many ideas had you recorded that you had to go through to compile the nine songs that make up “I Want Blood”?
Jerry : That’s a good question. Generally speaking, it’s not as many as you think. There are exceptions to the rule where you might demo, fifteen, sixteen, eighteen ideas or whatever and then boil that down to nine, ten or twelve songs for a record, but generally speaking what you get is what I wrote. I don’t know that there is anything left over like in a complete song form. There’s plenty of riffs and ideas and partial things that just didn’t flower into something. I think for this writing session, you know I collect riffs all the time, I don’t write all the time, but if I hear something when I’m playing or go that’s interesting, I’ll put it down. When it comes to write, I go through all of those ideas and I may have a year or two of ideas collected there. I looked at my phone the other day (laughs) and I think there’s like seven or eight hundred riffs on there, or little vocal things or little two-part ideas and that’s a lot to sift through. That’s also years and albums worth of ideas that just didn’t get realized, it doesn’t mean they’re not great or couldn’t be something. Once you write like an album’s worth of stuff then you’re good, you move on from whatever is left over, you know what I mean? And then the next time you start kind of fresh again, but on occasion I’ll dig back, you know and find a cool riff that, that I haven’t turned into a song yet. I think there’s a couple of those, a couple of riffs that I’ve had laying around. I think the main riff for ‘Throw Me A Line’, I’ve had around for a bit that just the main da dada da dada dada, I’ve had that around for a long time, but I didn’t have the rest of the song. It finally came into to being when I got into the writing session for this, and I think ‘Afterglow’, the main figure of the verse section I may have had that figure around for a couple of years but it never developed into a song until now. It takes time sometimes, and sometimes you got to sit on something before it finds its place to be. Otherwise, you move on and make something else and a lot of this record is really fresh, there’s a couple of things that I might have delved into the riff mine, as I call it and pulled a couple off the shelf and dusted them off and then added a bunch of cool shit to them.
Andrew : I had a look on your website regarding pre orders and variants for “I Want Blood’ and the thing that’s got me intrigued at the moment is that the vinyl or exclusively to vinyl version of the album which comes with nine bonus spoken word tracks. Tell me about this stuff. I’m curious and I’m kind of blown away by the whole idea behind it.
Jerry : When you’re making a record, especially when you’re doing a deluxe package and stuff like that, it’s nice to put some special things to it, whether it’s the package itself or maybe some B sides, artists do that all the time, different variations of things or maybe you’ll get an acapella track or an instrumental. I’ve done all of those, but I’m a big fan of the Doors and Jim Morrison and I just thought maybe it might be cool to do a spoken word lyric for the B-side of the first vinyl single of ‘Vilified’ and that’s really where the idea started from. I was just going to do one song, I did it and it sounded okay, but I thought it felt a little empty. I’m working with this really talented guy, Maxwell Urowski, he rode the hard miles with me, demoing all of the songs on this record. He’s also a really talented musician himself, and I thought I just wrote a record’s worth of music I don’t want to really write anymore. So, I’m like, Hey Max, you want to take a crack at writing a little piece of music to accompany this spoken word thing and he’s like, yeah, let me take a shot at it. He came back with that in about a day and it was great. It was fucking cool. I showed it to Joe Breezy and he’s like, man, you should do this to all of these songs. This is at the very end of the recording process. I think we were going to go to press with the vinyl within a couple of weeks and I’m like, dude, we only got two weeks. It’s like you can do it man so I got in and we recorded all the spoken word bits and then I sent them out to all of my friends who were involved in the making of this record and the last record then a couple other people. Roy Mayorga, the drummer in my touring band did a couple of great musical tracks. It’s just kind of a little special thing, a different light on the lyrics of the song. The music is all really cool, different and individual. Greg Puciato did a really great one and the coolest thing about it is the music has nothing to do with the music on the record. It’s completely unique. It’s a real different look at the lyrical content.
Andrew : I’m really excited to check to check that out. I realize we don’t have a lot of time and I really do want to thank you for your time and want to congratulate you on the album. I can’t wait to have it sit with me for a few more days before I sort of put pen to paper and reviewing it as well. You mentioned you’d been on tour for a couple of months prior to the album’s release? What are your touring plans post release?
Jerry : The record’s gonna come out the week of the 18th and we’ve got a bunch of fun stuff we’re gonna do. We’re going to do a gig out in the desert, out in California at a little place called Pappy and Harriet’s. I’m also going to be doing some in store signings in Los Angeles, Seattle and London. That’s that whole week and then there’s a handful of shows in South America in November. We’ll be playing Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Sao Paulo. Then the real touring probably will start up in winter (January to March). We’ll be rolling through the States, we’re gonna try to get to Europe in the summer and see where, anywhere else we can get to. It’d be great to come to Australia. Um, it’s not always easy to get down there but it would be really cool to find an opportunity to come down and play. I don’t think I’ve ever gone down there solo. That would be really fun to be able to do so, but we’ll see. All of next year is going to be a lot of touring.
Andrew : Well, I hope you do make it out here with your band. It’d be an absolute treat to see you and hear your solo stuff live and in person. Again, Jerry, thank you so much for your time. You’ve been an absolute gentleman today and hopefully we get to chat again.
Jerry : Right on, man. Thank you. No worries. Thank you. Take care.
