Alice In Chains singer/guitarist Jerry Cantrell discussed Black Gives Way to Blue and saying goodbye to Layne Staley in a new Vice interview.
“We weren’t nervous because we felt the same way we felt every time we put a record out. We knew it was good. We were continuing on. We were reinventing ourselves. Those are all elements of everybody’s life. We weren’t ready to fucking give up yet. And we were thankfully proved right, and the majority of our fans came along with us, minus, like, three trolls. [Laughs] You know, ‘No Layne, No Chains,’ kinda bullshit. [Laughs]
We undertook it to prove it to ourselves. That record, and the title track, is a love letter to Layne. It’s a goodbye to him.”
He also compared writing The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here to earlier albums.
“I think it’s exactly the same. I’m a kind of a bury-myself-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods writer, where I prefer to go out there and have everybody leave me alone until I’m done. It’s a little bit of a trek into yourself. Which can be fucking scary, man—your head is not a neighborhood you should always travel in alone.”
He also discussed the title track.
“It was definitely meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I think there are elements of that in our early work, too.”
