ALICE IN CHAINS Singer Says New Songs Are Going Over Well In Concert

Michael Lello of Weekender recently conducted an interview with ALICE IN CHAINS vocalist William DuVall. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Weekender: The album and the singles, as well as the video for "Your Decision", are doing really well. Do you feel that the crowds at your concerts are also connecting with the new songs?

DuVall: Yeah, yeah. We're definitely getting that feeling. It's a great thing. It's really very heartening to experience how well these new songs sit alongside the older catalog songs in the set and see very similar reactions form the fans, you know? And this includes songs that aren't even singles, you know? We go into "Last Of My Kind" or "Acid Bubble", and it's on, you know what I mean?

Weekender: This band probably could've done quite well playing shows even if you never recorded any new material.

DuVall: Absolutely. I understand what you're saying in terms of what we might be able to do, something like that in terms of what the industry would require. We might be able to get people to come and see us. But in terms of who we are as people, it's unthinkable to do something like that. This was absolutely necessary for us.

Weekender: You've been playing with Jerry Cantrell since 2000, first as a member of his band and now with ALICE IN CHAINS. Did having that history with Jerry make it a more seamless process for you coming into ALICE IN CHAINS?

DuVall: Certainly. In fact, I don't know how it could've happened any other way. I can't separate what happened from how it happened. I go back with Cantrell 10 years now. When I met him, he was a big fan of COMES WITH THE FALL, and I was a big fan of ALICE, and I was a big fan of what he was working on at that time, which was (Cantrell's second solo album) "Degradation Trip". We ended up coming together to tour the "Degradation Trip" album for about two years straight there. … We were also doing ALICE songs in his set. That would be the first time I had to wrap my head around some of those songs and sing them.

Weekender: How have you approached singing the songs originally sung by Layne Staley? What was it like on your first tour with ALICE IN CHAINS?

DuVall: I've just come out just as myself doing this stuff. Every night in spite of what was going on outside of our sort of four-man, very insular scene, we were playing gigs. So whatever noise or doubts were going on, we were playing gigs every night, and that's the way you get to see what you're made of. That's how the four of us really bonded. That's how the four of us became what we are. There really is no substitute for that. That galvanized us into a unit and gave us the momentum to go into the studio and make this new album.

Weekender: The vocal harmonies in ALICE IN CHAINS — first between Cantrell and Staley, and now between Cantrell and you — are unique in the hard-rock genre. Is this something particularly interesting for you as a singer?

DuVall: It's really cool. Yeah, I would say that that is something that is pretty unique to the whole ALICE IN CHAINS aesthetic. You don't hear a lot of that. I used to joke with Cantrell when we first met that it's like THE ASSOCIATION or CROSBY, STILLS & NASH crossed with SABBATH. And yeah, that's really one of those sonic fingerprints that they kind of put on the music scene. I have always loved doing a lot of vocal harmony-based music, but I hadn't done a lot of work in that area myself.

Read the entire interview from Weekender.