I feel like it’s fair to say that Alice in Chains has always had a pretty interpretable approach to songwriting. From “Man in the Box” to “Rooster,” some of their biggest songs are ones you could sit and talk about for hours, dissecting each line. If you ask the band’s guitarist, Jerry Cantrell, however, none of it “means anything.”
Way back in the early ’90s, Cantrell and the late Alice in Chains frontman, Layne Staley, sat down to talk about their music, with Cantrell offering some insight into his quite paradoxical approach to songwriting. “Writing is just communication for me, but I’m not trying to communicate to anybody,” he told journalist Liz Evans for New Musical Express in ’93.
“It doesn’t mean anything to me from other people’s points of view,” Cantrell continued. “It’s nice to hear them, but they’re not my responsibility. Our music isn’t literal. Although we write about endings and death a lot, it’s not necessarily actually about dying.”
“It’s more about capturing a feeling, capturing that fucking frustration,” the musician added. “It’s like painting. Good writing isn’t just laid out for you; you have to dig into it for a while and weigh it around. It doesn’t need to be chopped up or explained any more than that. It’s just an experience, and you’ll either get it or you won’t.”
Commenting on the dark subject matter they’d tackled in their lyrics up to that point, Cantrell explained, “Well, we don’t do it to bum people out, it’s not about degeneracy or any of that shit. There are just things that we see or think or feel that aren’t very pretty, but we turn it into something beautiful with the music.”
“I’m the same as you or anybody else,” he went on to say, “I deal with every single emotion that’s on the record right through to the happiest emotion, and you can’t tell me you haven’t felt those things. I’m not a manic depressive, and I’m not up and down all the time. I’m pretty average.”
“I don’t delve into other people very deeply, not even people I’m close to very often,” Cantrell added. “It gets really uncomfortable digging for shit like that. That’s why I put this stuff into the music. I don’t want to talk about a lot of what I write — nobody would.”
Finally, he offered, “People just aren’t comfortable doing that, especially with someone they hardly know. In my family, things are talked about, discussed, and dealt with, but it’s none of anybody else’s business.”
The post ‘It Doesn’t Mean Anything to Me’: Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell’s Paradoxical Approach To Songwriting appeared first on VICE.
