ALICE IN CHAINS Guitarist Discusses Collaboration With ELTON JOHN

William Goodman of SPIN.com recently conducted an interview with ALICE IN CHAINS guitarist Jerry Cantrell. An excerpt from the chat follows below.

SPIN.com: How did the collaboration with Elton John come together? It's a little surprising.

Cantrell: It makes a lot of sense to us. But the fact that it happened in the first place is something we didn't expect. We were in the studio and were getting near the end. "Black Gives Way to Blue" was one of the last songs we cut. We were trying to figure out if we wanted a piano track on it. Our friend Todd who was in the room suggested calling Elton just out of the blue and we all looked at him like he was crazy. Of course we would love for that to happen, but we were like, "Nah that's not going to happen, that dude's busy. He's got his own thing going on." But Todd was like, "Hey man, you never know unless you ask. I think he might do it!" So we put that idea to the test.

SPIN.com: How did you get him into the studio?

Cantrell: I wrote him an email and explained that the song was for [late ALICE IN CHAINS singer] Layne [Staley], and we heard that he was interested in doing it. Later, as we continued working on the record, it turned out that Elton was doing a session in the same studio as us in Los Angeles. [Drummer] Sean [Kinney] and I went out to lunch and we got a call from the studio manager saying, "Hey, Elton wants to talk to you." We're like, "We'll be back after lunch," and he said, "No, he's taking off here in a few minutes so you guys need to get back here right now." So we canned the lunch and tore ass back to the studio and walked into the room that Elton was tracking in. He got up and gave us both a hug and said, "I just wanted to tell you that it's a great tune and I want to play a track on it." We were totally blown away.

SPIN.com: Was Layne a fan of Elton?

Cantrell: Yep. And, coincidentally, about a week ago Layne's mom reminded me that Elton John was Layne's first concert and she said he was blown away. Layne told me that once, but I had totally forgotten about it. It brought back some really cool memories. There's a lot of really weird things lining up here. Number one: the significance of Elto to ALICE IN CHAINS. Number two: it was Layne's first concert. And to have Elton play on a song for Layne, whew, it means so much to us.

Read the entire interview from SPIN.com.