Photo credits: Dustin Halter for Alternative Nation
Alice In Chains singer/guitarist William DuVall discussed Chris Cornell’s impact on the band’s new album Rainier Fog in a new Pop Matters interview.
The names and memories of others he’d known, not all of them famous, swirled around him as well. “It all hit me in the same way,” he recalls. “You never get used to it. I was just thinking about that and how the one monofilament through all of that is the love and regard you feel for these people allows them never truly to leave you. In that way, they become permanent or as close to immortal as one can get.”
Determined to stay until he’d conveyed all he’d hoped to convey, the singer left the studio in the early dawn, feeling, in his words, that he’d “had a spiritual experience.”
Asked whether he felt like he got at some of the larger questions surrounding the sessions, DuVall says, “Inasmuch as we can find answers to these really profound and largely unanswerable questions about the nature of existence and the nature of love. I guess you get as close to finding some resolution as you can through letting that stuff go in your expression. It makes doing this all worthwhile.”
Cornell remained very much on the group’s mind and not just via the specter of grief. During tracking the late vocalist’s sister brought one of her brother’s acoustic guitars to Studio X and presented it to DuVall and Cantrell. “It was a guitar he used to write songs on in the studio,” notes DuVall. “Cantrell and I both played it. That was another religious moment. It’s there in the mix, every time we listen to this record, we know where it is.”
