In the early 1970s. 1971, '72. The rooms were closing down, record labels weren't signing acoustic acts any more. Although they had been pretty much been getting out of that for some time before that.
The group-effort sound in recording of 'Sea Lion' is like, you really hear all the people in the room and hear them interlocking. There's a real freight-train energy of all these people at the same time playing.
I think it was Duke Ellington who once said that we're always most pleased with our current record. I mean, you have to assume that you learn from one, and you do something better next time.
We had been working. We had a bunch of songs written and it came time to make the record, so we had our lawyer make the call to Elektra and ask for our advance. Then, we got dropped. It was actually exciting.
Our first record didn't come out on vinyl, so I think that might have had something to do with actually being in a position to make sure that it came out in vinyl this time. It sounds way better.
Classical musicians do this all the time. They want perfection. So they piece things together. Eight bars of this and six bars of that. Glenn Gould said that with a recording he wanted to make perfect versions of pieces.
I'm going to keep thinking about topping myself every time. I can say very confidently that Alice In Chains have done that on every record. It surprises me. I don't go in there expecting that, but I do go in there hoping for it.
No, I got my web site going and said I have the record out. People were just falling on the floor - they couldn't believe it - after all that time. You know, it wasn't a compilation, it was new songs.
I thought I'd be wasting my time to go to commercial record companies and make demos for them, because don't forget, I was doing what I was doing and nobody understood what I was doing.
Speed eventually neared its peak. The records forced me to work ever harder to drop a less and less time. These time trials came to feel like races, which are fun to run sporadically but not daily.
Hanging out is a waste of time. The only time I would hang out was when I was a kid, I would hang out in the streets. But once I started making records, I stopped hanging out.
By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn't need pen or paper - my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape.
My process is to be by myself when I record. It's quite an emotional performance to pull off when someone else is in the room. I prefer to go away and have my own time with it, bring it in later.
It can get a little costly if you try and leave it until then to write songs. But you're writing all the time. You're collecting songs. I've had songs that have been collected over a two-year period for my next record.
I made that first record in 2008, alongside the EP, but my label at the time waited three years to release it. They thought maybe someone bigger would buy it, but they didn't, so in the end they just released it themselves.
I'm very conscious of people having pretty short attention spans: I know, I'm guilty of it. I'm 17 now: what happens by the time I'm 21, am I a burn-out or something? Will they still listen to my record?
I always kind of think if The Beatles were still around now, people would've lost interest quite a long time ago. Seven years of recording - it's there forever. I think not outstaying your welcome is a vital ingredient.
Everybody gets to a stage when it's time to move on. I was bored, and the band wasn't going anywhere, so I left. I did a couple of shows on Broadway and some other things. I was busy. I just wasn't making records.
At one time they've been the most important thing to me. So I can't hear our records on the radio, I can't stand it, because they sound so out of what everyone else is doing.
I've written a song for Prince. I never showed it to Prince, but just to see if I could do it. At the time, when I sort of knew him, he was recording a song a day. I wondered if I could do that. So I wrote it.
Trust me, I did not set out to establish three pen names and, for the record, I do not recommend it as a career strategy. The idea back at the start was that I would stick with the name that proved most successful.
