Seal reveals his surprising love for Alice in Chains: “This band were really significant for me”
Grunge legends Alice in Chains and British R&B hero Seal are not two names you’d ever associate with one another. The Seattle band created incredibly dark, pulsating music that tapped into the psychological darkness of Generation X with forensic accuracy. Seal, meanwhile, was the man behind the classic 1990s ballad ‘Kiss from a Rose’ and operated in another realm altogether. However, despite their differences, Seal recently revealed himself as a big fan of Alice in Chains, waxing lyrical about the group and expressing how they were “really significant” to his life.
Seal delivered his surprising and lucid account of Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell’s group when speaking to Amoeba Records for the 800th episode of their internet series What’s In My Bag? For this instalment, he picked several classic records, including Neil Young’s Harvest and Kate Bush’s The Hounds of Love. However, Alice in Chain’s 1992 sophomore effort, Dirt, stood out.
After discussing CSNY’s countercultural manifesto, Déjà Vu, Seal switched things up by pulling Dirt from his bag. He then gave a detailed analysis of the band, explaining what they meant to him and why they were such a force, drawing parallels between them and traditional R&B.
Seal explained: “Facelift was the first one, and it had ‘Man in the Box’. This band were really significant for me. Because when I left England at the beginning of my career, grunge had just kicked off. I remember coming to Los Angeles and being in a cab and talking to the driver. And we got talking about music. He said, ‘What kind of music do you like? What are you interested in?’, and I said, ‘Well, I’m really curious about this grunge thing; I really like it.’ He said, ‘Who are the bands?’ I said, ‘You know, I love Nirvana, of course, and I like Pearl Jam.’ And he said, ‘Oh, they’re cool. Have you heard of this band called Alice in Chains?’. I went, ‘Well, no’, and he put on ‘Man in the Box’, and that was it.”
He continued: “I heard Layne’s voice, Layne and Jerry singing together with those close harmonies, and yes. And so, out of that whole grunge period, they were by far, by far, my favourite and, I think the most underrated. There were some great songs on here, the obvious one being ‘Rooster’, which Jerry wrote about his father coming home from Vietnam. I love the artistry, obviously, but there’s a real sexiness to their music. It’s dark, it’s beautiful, it’s melancholic, but it’s really sexy, and it’s weighty.”
The ‘Kiss from a Rose’ singer concluded his account and remembered the late Layne Staley: “They had something that all of those other bands from that era, that grunge era (didn’t have); they had something truly unique. They had a soul that was almost like an R&B-type soul, even though it didn’t sound like R&B, but that guttural soul, as opposed to just kind of being in your head, hence headbanger. They had stuff that got you right down here (stomach). I love, I’m a big fan of Alice in Chains, and Layne’s voice, and his approach. God rest his soul.”
Watch Seal discuss his love for Alice in Chains below.
