Jerry Cantrell taps into the zeitgeist on new solo album ‘I Want Blood’
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Jerry Cantrell’s signature stylings consistently land him near the top of “best guitarist” polls. His heavy, nuanced songs and personal lyrics — from Alice in Chains’ “Rooster” to “Cut You in” and his four solo records
— are multilayered, often willfully opaque and always powerful. Yet he sometimes finds that only a German word gets the point across.
In the opening lines of “Vilified,” the first track of his latest album, “I Want Blood,” he sings, “Simulate the feel / Of all that’s true and real / Hey-a schadenfreude crescendo / Hey-a skew the innuendo.”
“Yeah, you don’t get to use ‘schadenfreude’ in a lyric very often, so I was kind of happy to check that one off the list,” Cantrell says with a hearty chuckle.
“At different times, [people] seem to take a little bit more pleasure in creating chaos and pointing fingers at each other,” he furthers of the song’s topical gist. “It seems like we’ve kind of been living through that, one of those periods where it’s a little more prevalent, in your face. That word gets thrown around, and I think it’s an appropriate descriptor.”
It can be hard to find an appropriate descriptor for Cantrell. Since 1990, he’s come across as prickly, goofy (proof positive: 1990s shenanigans clad in a blue Speedo at New Jersey’s Action Park on MTV’s “Headbanger’s Ball”), thoughtful, serious, wasted, and now, thankfully, 20 years sober. Born in Tacoma, Wash., the one-time high school choir president was an aspiring rock star who hung around at a Guns N’ Roses concert to hand a demo tape to Axl Rose. Which, the story goes, the red-headed stranger promptly tossed into a nearby trash bin. Sans an Axl assist, Alice in Chains still emerged from a crowded Seattle grunge scene and found deserved fame thanks to several timeless, hit-laden studio albums and EPs in the early to mid ’90s.
Addiction also found the band, ending the lives of half its members, singer Layne Staley in 2002 and ex-bassist Mike Starr in 2011. Cantrell relocated part-time to L.A. where he found a strong community of sober creatives, and he’s now thrived substance-free for 20 years. Cantrell, 58, explains, “I still live in the Seattle area as well, but L.A. kind of became my adopted sober home, and my Bermuda Triangle is basically Seattle, Oklahoma and L.A.”
Which makes his gig at the Tulsa Theater a hometown show, with his dad’s side of the family based in Oklahoma “for generations.” Speaking by phone ahead of his concert, Cantrell has already had a full day. After soundcheck, an afternoon meet-and-greet and interview, he’ll “jump in the shower, get my body working and do a rock show.” Oh, and his younger brother [David] is probably waiting for him to get off the phone, he says.
Life seems as good as the music he’s making, yet no shortage of Cantrell lyrics delve into a drug-pervasive darkness. “I Want Blood” seems rife with double meanings and entendres, with titles and lyrics like “Off the Rails” or “Throw Me a Line” that could refer to struggling with desire and substances or seeking salvation. Which were once maybe the same thing.
“That’s a part of who I am,” Cantrell explains. “I’m a sober alcoholic, so that’s always going to be in there. But I wouldn’t say that any particular song or the whole record is geared toward that. It’s a thread in the tapestry. When I’m writing songs, I try to put multiple meanings of certain phrases or lines. My job is to take my experience in the world and spit it back at itself. And do it in some sort of fashion that feels authentic and honest to [me],” Cantrell says.
Successful touring and records with both Alice in Chains (featuring singer William DuVall since 2006) and solo — among myriad other projects — can never ease the trauma of losing so many friends in the Seattle scene. And more pointedly, the death of Cantrell’s mother Gloria from cancer when he was just 21. But the singer-songwriter is adept at funneling past pain into the present, and seems driven and solid in his creativity and life.
“Records for me are a lot of hard work,” Cantrell says. “You have to maintain a lot of focus over a period of time, and be able to keep your vision intact through all the turbulence. Making a record is [seriously] turbulent as hell,” he says. “You’re bringing something that does not exist out of the f— darkness into being.”
That said, both musically and personally, there’s often an undercurrent of sarcasm and even some levity in and around the darkness. “You’ve got to be able to have a little bit of a sense of humor about yourself, and also the world in general, you know, or it’s gonna be a [really] long grind.”
A prime example? Spinal Tap. Not just the movie, but Cantrell’s brief moment onstage with the band at the Universal Amphitheater, the storied venue whose incarnation since 2016 has been the Tap-appropriate the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Cantrell’s memory is slightly hazy, but he recalls being invited to play, “Christmas With the Devil” with Tap. Virtuosic Toto guitarist Steve Lukather was at the gig, and “I think Jennifer Batten [of Michael Jackson fame] was there too. You’ve already got two heavy weights. I show up. I don’t have a guitar. I don’t have an amp,” he recalls. “They’ve got all their big Bradshaw systems, aircraft control tower-sized amplifiers set up on stage.”
Harry Shearer and Michael McKean — bassist Derek Smalls and guitarist David St. Hubbins in their metallic alter-egos — approached Cantrell somewhat sheepishly. “I know we invited you down, but we’ve got these guys, and we don’t have an amp for you,” they told the guitarist. “On a counter they had a little battery-powered Marshall, a little mini amp,” Cantrell remembers. “I’m like, ‘Dude, put that on the stage and tape it down and put a big boom mic all the way down to it. That’s [pure] comedy.’ ”
The duo was surprised Cantrell was up for the schtick, Shearer questioning, “You’ll do that?”
“I’m like, ‘Yeah, dude, that’s f— Spinal Tap. I’ll play through that thing.’ They thought it was a great idea, and we did it.” Cantrell got his Stonehenge moment, and he’s still stoked by the memory. “I had my own personal Spinal Tap moment, which I helped create with Michael McKean!”
That “making it up as you go along” spirit found its way into the deluxe version of “I Want Blood.” Seeking to create something cool for collectors, but without extra songs to release, Cantrell thought he’d try a spoken-word take on Device’s “Vilify.” He felt the result wasn’t “quite cool enough.” Fortunately, in making “I Want Blood,” Cantrell was “surrounded by a bunch of talented people, and my demo partner, Maxwell Urasky, is a talented musician. I’m like, ‘Hey, man, you want to try to put some music to this? I just wrote a record. I don’t want to write another piece of music.’ ”
Urasky composed a “score,” for a spoken-word version of “Vilify,” and Cantrell showed the completed version to “I Want Blood” producer Joe Barresi (Queens of the Stone Age, Tool, Bad Religion), “and I think [collaborators] Greg Puciato and Tyler [Bates, musician/composer] as well.” The consensus? Cantrell needed to do a spoken-word version of every song on the just-finished album. There was a two-week deadline. And the album’s remaining eight songs new music and soundscapes to go under Cantrell’s recitations. The singer recited the lyrics for each song, then sent them to his musical allies.
“Everybody rallied. I’m just as surprised as anyone at the end of the day,” Cantrell laughs. “Like, holy crap, that’s fucking cool. You never would have got there if you weren’t engaged and in the process and trying to figure it out. It’s always fun to just to see what the hell I can pull off, or be a part of pulling off, or creating.“
He joins the grand tradition of dark artists like Jim Carroll or William Burroughs in the spoken-word world, or as Cantrell quips, “[William] Shatner and [Leonard] Nimoy.” “It was kind of fun to get into that space, that kind of calm, audiobook kind of voice,” he admits, and while he’s currently reading Cormac McCarthy (which seems the perfect accompaniment to Cantrell’s songwriting), he’s focused on music rather than a career in audiobooks for the foreseeable future.
Cantrell doesn’t write the simplest of songs to parse, but it seems he wants to be seen, as well as have listeners see parts of themselves in his music. The aural dig is worth it for all. While the reward of making a record is certainly in the creation, it’s also in the reception, as the singer-songwriter notes. “This is a good record. It was like, ‘I want to release this, and put my name on it; I stand behind it.’ You throw it out there. I’ve been lucky enough to have people react to it, support it and get it. Get it,” he emphasizes, concluding, “You know, that’s the whole thing.”
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