Have you ever met Jerry Cantrell?
“Friends, you might want to use a search engine before asking me a question.”
What click bait shenanigans can we cook up tonight?
“It’s so easy to do it’s not worth your time.”
After show ritual?
“Smoking trolls out of holes with deception Q and A format.”
What do you think of the current Golden State Warriors compared to 90’s Chicago Bulls?
“Bulls better, tougher. Know Steve Kerr, very happy for him. But peak MJ Bulls would beat Golden State 2 out of 3 tries (in a series).”
Do you still have the guitar you wrote ‘I love my Mom’ on?
“Yes. It’s the blue one I play onstage every night.”
United Rock Nations recently interviewed Alice In Chains bassist Mike Inez and drummer Sean Kinney at last month’s Hellfest in Clisson, France.
Speaking about Alice In Chains’ upcoming album, Rainier Fog, Mike said: “It’s a cool record. Records are like signposts in your career, and this is where we’re at in 2018. We don’t think about it too much — we don’t go, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta do a record like this,’ or, ‘We’ve gotta do a record like that.’ There’s a filtering process — everybody throws their riffs and stuff in the meat grinder, or coffee machine, and 10 songs drip out of that over the course of a year.
“I really like this record,” he continued. “We had a different mixer, and we recorded in a different city. We went back to Seattle to do the basic tracks, where Sean lives, so Sean got to go home every night.
“We approach it the same — we just plug our guitars in the fucking amplifiers, and everything kind of turns out all right for us, so we’ve learned to trust that, and it’s cool. I love this record; it’s one of my favorites, actually.”
Kinney also talked about Alice In Chains’ longevity, saying: “I feel like we already won, that we’re still moving forward. We made another record that we dug, we’re still making music we like, we still live our lives in a pretty straightforward, true way that we haven’t been affected and chased trends. We just kind of forged our own little way of going through life and going through all the same things that everybody has to go through — all the loss and ups and downs and the high points and low points. The only difference is sometimes you have to do it in the public a little bit. And that you’re still doing it, you’re doing it with your friends and doing it for the same reason when we started the band when I was 20 to now, it’s a pretty cool thing.”
He added: “I never really could even wrap [my] head around that all which has happened would happen and how it has. And that’s the cool thing with life — you get knocked down and you keep going. Try to do what you like. If you can make a living supporting yourself and not being a financial or emotional burden on anybody else, and you just like making coffee cups, but you’re good at it and you can make a living to support yourself, then that’s as good as life gets. And so we’re fortunate to be able to do what we like for a living… We don’t live by anybody else’s rules, so we can forge our own, which I think is kind of the victory to it all.”
