In a recent interview with Rick Beato, Alice In Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell talked about his and his bandmates’ solo careers. He mentioned that focusing on solo stuff is the healthy thing to do for now.
“I’ve done four records in my entire career. Two of them were done back to back in 98 and 2001 and these two records have been done in about a two and a half three year window as well,” the guitarist explained. “So it’s a weird kind of completion of a circle I guess in a way. I didn’t mean for that to be the case but I just happened to be in a particular part of life where I felt like that was something I wanted to spend some time doing. It’s interesting.”
“I always am and always will be a member of Alice In Chains and that has taken precedence of my attention and focus most of my life. So that’s always going to be a big part of me, but there are other times and other needs where you want to maybe plant yourself in some fresh soil and see what you can kind of make outside of that as well. So I think it’s healthy all members of the band have at one time worked on other projects or done solo records, from Layne [Staley] on to me and William [DuVall] and Mike [Starr] and Sean [Kinney] to have done records with Chris DeGarmo and Vinnie [Dombroski] from Sponge,” he added.
The interview came just a short time after the guitarist shared some updates about Alice In Chains. The band seems to be working on something, but it’s not new music or album-related work.
“There’s a couple of things that we’re working on, like non-album related,” Cantrell said in a different interview. However, he mentioned that it’s an interesting work. “It’s an interesting work. One song is not going to really give you the complete picture of a record, but it gives you a pretty good sneak preview of some of the places that might be explored on this,” he added.
In other news, Cantrell is gearing up for his solo album release on October 18. He’s already dropped two singles, ‘Vilified’ and ‘Afterglow.’