Alice in Chains released their self-titled third album on CD and cassette on November 7, 1995, a week after the vinyl edition reached U.S. stores. On the opening track, “Grind,” Jerry Cantrell sings lead and plays a guitar solo he spent much of the recording process hoping to replace. He’d already played it once at home. His first pass is the one on the record.
Cantrell had been writing during a break the band badly needed. After the Jar of Flies EP, he recalled, the four of them were worn out enough that carrying on might have ended the group. Layne Staley went off to sing with Mad Season. Cantrell worked on songs of his own, but he recognized the band in what he was playing. “It just ended up sounding like Alice,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He had “Grind” far enough along to play the demo for drummer Sean Kinney, who was excited about it from that first listen.
When it came time to finish “Grind,” Cantrell could still hear room for improvement. Co-producer Toby Wright kept asking him to give the demo solo another listen. Cantrell told Guitar World he’d recorded it on his ADAT machine and never got around to cutting the replacement he had in mind. It took him a while to come around to Wright’s opinion. “In the end, it’s perfect for the record,” he said.
Wright was willing to put plenty of work into the sound of that same track. He told reporter Gene Stout that he kept Cantrell’s lead vocal relatively clean, then ran Staley’s microphone through a distortion pedal. He recorded the pedal at full volume and blended that signal with the clean microphone. Listen to the chorus and you can hear the two voices clearly enough to follow the harmony, even with that ragged edge on Staley’s part.
The band had started demo sessions at Seattle’s London Bridge Studio in March before regrouping at Bad Animals in April. “Grind” and “Over Now” were already well developed. Much of what went between them arrived in pieces. One of those pieces caught Cantrell and bassist Mike Inez by surprise. As Cantrell recalled on Gibson TV’s Icons, they were playing with another musician when they hit on the riff for “Heaven Beside You.” Their guest liked it, too. Cantrell steered them onto something else, then turned to Inez once they had the room to themselves. He wanted to get right back to that riff. It became the acoustic guitar figure that opens the song. Staley, who wrote the lyrics to nine of the album’s 12 tracks, also brought in a guitar composition of his own, “Head Creeps.”
On “Over Now,” it was Cantrell’s turn to hear something worth keeping while the musician who’d played it could hear only what bothered him. As he recalled in The Billboard Book of Number One Albums, he and Kinney had played the long arrangement together for the demo. Cantrell came out of the take thinking they’d held it together beautifully. Kinney got up and threw his drums across the room.
His drum track stayed. “Over Now” closed the album when it debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. The following April, Kinney and Cantrell played it together again for MTV Unplugged. On the live album, you can hear them take it almost to the end of the set, with just “Killer Is Me” left to play.
