Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell Reflects on Songwriting, Inspiration, and Early Struggles
“Music isn’t really that hard, I can come up with riffs all day long, but lyrics always take the most time for me,” he said.
Throughout his career, Jerry Cantrell has pulled double duty as lead guitarist and principal songwriter for Alice in Chains. On the second episode of “Never Meet Your Heroes” on VOLUME, host Scott Ian dove into Cantrell’s approach to writing lyrics.
“It’s mostly music first, and then the music kind of evokes a vibe,” Cantrell said. “Or [the lyrics] may just hit you at a time when something is stuck in your head, or there’s something that you feel passionately about.”
Cantrell has penned some of Alice in Chains’ most poignant and deeply personal songs, including the hits “Rooster,” a tribute to his father, and “Would?,” a tribute to his close friend Andrew Wood. As he moves further into his decades-long career, Cantrell said it’s becoming more challenging to write lyrics that still feel meaningful.
“It gets a little more difficult to come up with stuff to write about because you’ve already written about so many vibes or subjects or situations or whatever,” he said. “Music isn’t really that hard — I can come up with riffs all day long — but lyrics always take the most time for me. I don’t want to say something I don’t mean or feel strongly about, so you kind of just have to wait until that happens.”
As Ian writes music and lyrics for his band Anthrax, he empathized with Cantrell. Still, the two agreed that the challenge of writing meaningful lyrics is part of the joy of making music.
“The cool thing about making music — and we’re lucky enough to have been doing it for a number of years, been successful at it, and still able to do it — is the fact that no matter what success you’ve had and no matter what you’ve written in the past, you have to start at a complete zero every time,” Cantrell said. “It’s terrifying. It’s frustrating. It’s a commitment. It’s an amazing thing to go through. At the beginning of it, it feels, for me, every time, like it’s insurmountable, but you know that you’ve gone through it before, so you’ve got the benefit of the experience of ‘this is the way it is every time.’ What are we going to come up with now? What are we going to say now?”
Cantrell also reflected on the artists who shaped his love of songwriting, citing Elton John and Fleetwood Mac as early influences. Later in his career, he had the opportunity to work with Elton John on a track and said of the experience, “It’s like a circle completing itself.”
Beyond songwriting, Cantrell described Alice in Chains’ first gig, a surprise 30-minute set offered by another artist sharing their rehearsal space, and recalled a time when the band members, struggling to get by, took advantage of a canned food drive happening at the venue where they were performing.
