ALICE IN CHAINS: 'It's A World Where People Steal Music And Record Companies Can't Sell Music'

Tom Valcanis of Crushtor.net recently conducted an interview with ALICE IN CHAINS drummer Sean Kinney. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

On ALICE IN CHAINS almosing disappearing completely, never to be seen again:

Kinney: "Well, we sort of shut down when, back in the day, when things were really starting to blow up around us. We made the wise career choice of never performing after releasing two number one albums back to back. So we stuck with that plan by not doing anything for ten years. Then of course Layne [Staley, singer], had passed away. This was something I didn't foresee happening and it just naturally had taken its course. As long as it feels good and it's cool and it's genuine with us and we like it, it just kind of evolved to this point. Things are going along pretty great. It'll be interesting too. It's such a different world out there."

On the current state of the music industry:

Kinney: "It's a world where people steal music and record companies can't sell music. They sort of screwed up. It's such a different time and place; there are so many real unknowns now. It's going to be really cool. . . The great thing is that you can get your music out to a lot of people. But on the flipside, people want it for free. Studio time isn't free; we put a lot of money and effort into what we do. They expect us to be talking to them twenty-four hours a day on blogs and things. It takes the mystery away, I think. We're not from that 'era.' That was never really our 'thing.' It'll be interesting to see how we fit in, if we fit in."

On recording the new album at Studio 606 in California with Grammy Award-winning producer Nick Rasculinecz (RUSH, TRIVIUM, DEATH ANGEL, FOO FIGHTERS):

Kinney: "Well, we had a few tunes happening and it got up to the point where we said, 'Hey, let's make a record.' So we started thinking about producers, and Nick's the kind of guy like us; we don't use a lot of the stuff that people use nowadays, we're not doing song inspections and we're not doing autotunes and shit like that. We're really old school. We actually play everything you hear. (laughs) Sonically, he does some really great stuff. [He makes] what you hear is what's really going on, and we really liked that."

Read the entire interview from Crushtor.net.

Video footage of ALICE IN CHAINS' February 28, 2009 performance at the Soundwave Festival in Adelaide, Australia can be viewed below (clips uploaded by "backpackdave08").

"Man in the Box":

"Angry Chair":