I feel like it’s fair to say that Alice in Chains has always had a pretty interpretable approach to songwriting. From “Man in the Box” to “Rooster,” some of their biggest songs are ones you could sit and talk about for hours, dissecting each line. If you ask the band’s guitarist, Jerry Cantrell, however, none of it “means anything.”

Way back in the early ’90s, Cantrell and the late Alice in Chains frontman, Layne Staley, sat down to talk about their music, with Cantrell offering some insight into his quite paradoxical approach to songwriting. “Writing is just communication for me, but I’m not trying to communicate to anybody,” he told journalist Liz Evans for New Musical Express in ’93.

“It doesn’t mean anything to me from other people’s points of view,” Cantrell continued. “It’s nice to

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