Alice in Chains released Dirt on September 29, 1992, through Columbia Records. Their second studio album reunited the band with producer Dave Jerden, but the writing had opened up: Layne Staley was contributing songs on guitar, while Jerry Cantrell used “Rooster” to examine his father’s experience in Vietnam and the distance between them.
The material had been taking shape throughout the touring cycle for Facelift. Cantrell collected ideas on a handheld recorder and a four-track, while rehearsals, soundchecks and dressing-room jams gave the band opportunities to develop them. In a 2022 interview with Billboard, drummer Sean Kinney recalled that some songs had already passed through different live versions before the recording sessions.
“Rain When I Die” took shape during rehearsals at a converted barn studio owned by Mick Fleetwood in Malibu. Cantrell and Staley had written their vocal parts separately, then discovered that each singer’s lines occupied gaps in the other’s arrangement. Combining them gave the song its shared vocal structure without either writer having planned around the other.
Staley’s contributions also included “Hate to Feel” and “Angry Chair,” songs he had considered saving for a solo project. His enthusiasm for industrial bands had encouraged that possibility, but his bandmates wanted to work on the material themselves. He agreed, and both songs became part of Dirt.
Recording ran from April through July 1992, with work at One on One in Los Angeles, Eldorado in Burbank and London Bridge in Seattle. Jerden had produced Facelift, so the sessions continued an established partnership with Cantrell, Staley, Kinney and bassist Mike Starr. They also gave the producer room to experiment with how the band’s performances were captured.
Jerden told MusicRadar in 2013 that he used a rented PA system to feed Kinney’s kick, snare and toms into the recording room at One on One. Large speakers, including a 31-inch woofer, helped create the room sound around the drums. At Eldorado, he combined three amplifiers to build Cantrell’s guitar tone, drawing on different parts of the frequency range rather than asking one amp to supply everything. Staley’s voice received equally detailed treatment: Jerden triple-tracked him and used an Eventide Harmonizer for delays, favoring their definition over the darker effect of reverb. He recalled that the basic tracks came together more easily than those on the debut, and that many mixes were finished in roughly half an hour.
For all that studio work, “Rooster” began in a small room at Chris Cornell and Susan Silver’s Seattle home, where Cantrell was staying in early 1991. In an interview with Classic Rock, he described trying to understand the war from his father’s perspective. The title came from his father’s childhood nickname. Writing from that viewpoint let Cantrell consider experiences his father had rarely discussed, and how they had affected the family.
The song’s video extended that conversation. Director Mark Pellington filmed an interview with Cantrell’s father and incorporated it alongside the war scenes. Cantrell had been surprised that his father agreed to speak about Vietnam on camera. When he asked whether the song had captured those experiences, his father told him, “You got too close – you hit it on the head.” Cantrell said the song helped the two become closer.
