Nostalgic Trips, Familiar Music

Alice in Chains, and some autobiography.

I’ve always loved music. Always sought out sounds and words to reflect and transcend the way I felt inside. The first artist I really loved was Eminem. I was a twelve year old girl, a child who was bullied, an alien amongst my peers, painstakingly learning the strange skill of molding my own identity to please others. Inside me was a frustration and anger that I couldn’t quite understand. He gave a voice to these feelings. Buried within the obscenities and mature imagery that made my curious young mind run wild there was a narrative that seemed oddly familiar—the story of a young boy who was just as lonely and out of place as me. It was cathartic. Through his exaggerated and at times aggressive music, the negative feelings within me which I could not identify or name were tapped into and released. And, when his voice went calm, and the music soft, the quietness hit even harder, and I was overwhelmed with the sense that everything was going to be okay. Sure, hidden in my preferred coping mechanism were a couple of bad influences, most notably a potty mouth which will probably stick with me forever. But I also found peace. I was able to understand myself, and accept myself, because I was not alone.

I will not be writing about Eminem today.

I typically have to spend a cumulative hour and a half every day riding the New York City subway. It is usually a relaxing experience. I rarely wind up on a crowded train, and I usually enjoy the time taken out of my day where I can just sit and listen to music. Paying close attention to music is usually not stimulating enough to be done alone and music is best when listened to closely. Walks are adequate accompaniment, but I usually find myself distracted by either my destination or my dog, missing full minutes of music. A train ride on a winter evening provides the perfect time to listen. All that awaits me at its end is the bitter cold, which will begin its creeping assault as soon as I exit onto the platform. The anticipation of work makes each moment feel precious. The populated but uninteresting background and the movement of the train underneath me provide just enough ambiance to keep the music from becoming boring. There’s no better way to enjoy a train ride, and no better way to enjoy an album. Yesterday, I found myself listening to an old favorite: Alice in Chains’ Jar of Flies.

Let’s rewind a bit, and see how I got here. In my teens, a bit embarrassed of my former fixation with Eminem and filled with yet more angst and frustration, I discovered rock music. At first, this came in the form of a godawful type of screamo music, the memory of which sends involuntary shudders up my spine. This was short-lived, though, and my tastes quickly matured to enjoy classic rock and heavy metal. I always preferred to be at least a couple of decades behind the times. Part of it was an idiotic sense of superiority, as if liking older, “good” music instead of what was playing on the radio made me somehow better than the peers that I was trying to distinguish myself from, but I think I also enjoyed the pressure that was lifted off of me by not having to compare my music taste with others. Teenage girls in 2014 weren’t exactly lining up to talk about Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath, so when I told anyone the type of music I liked, the conversation usually came to a dead stop, allowing me to keep my music private, relatively undisturbed. When I did share my music—which, oddly enough, I really enjoyed doing—it was with an aura of pretension, almost always aimed at a group of people who had no idea what I was talking about, and, in hindsight, definitely wished I would just shut up.

Eventually, in my late high school and early college years, I revisited Nirvana (a band to whom I had first taken a liking during the screamo years), and began exploring more of what the nineties had to offer. At this time in my life, recently thrust into college with no direction with an identity that had been so warped over the years that it didn’t even resemble me anymore, my angst and frustration was at an all-time high. I had been a pretty crabby and jealous person since high school, but by college, something as trivial as a person shaking their leg next to me in class was enough to get my blood boiling. I wasn’t confrontational; the unwitting subject of my wrath never knew the frenzy that their benign actions caused within me. But deep inside was this poisonous fury, gurgling its way to the surface more and more with every minor inconvenience, every stressor and every gripe. My music got louder, the respite it promised shorter-lived. I soon turned to marijuana, alcohol, and cigarettes for pacification. This caused more problems than solutions, as anyone who has ever tried this method can attest to.

It was at this point that I started to appreciate Alice in Chains. For a while I considered them my favorite band, and once again was taken by that familiar feeling of comfort that relatable music brings. Their song “Junkhead” was a favorite of mine.

What’s my drug of choice?

Well, what have you got?

Despite the fact that I’ve never touched a “hard” drug in my life, these words spoke to me. That feeling is familiar—the desperation, the willingness to take anything, do anything to numb the pain and pass the time. The fact that I didn’t get hooked on anything serious was probably just dumb luck, honestly.

Are you happy? I am, man

Content and fully aware.

Money, status, nothing to me,

‘Cause your life’s empty and bare.

If you’ve ever been within six feet of an addict, than you can smell this steaming pile of horseshit for what it is. There’s no life barer than one submitted to chemical escape. There’s no purpose more empty than the pursuit of fleeting oblivion. And isn’t the object of any kind of addiction the dulling of awareness? It doesn’t feel this way for an addict who’s in the thick of it, though, and these words, the voice of a man trapped within the depths of addiction with no intentions of getting out anytime soon, soothed my aching mind, which was lured by the same trap. Of course, the contradictory nature of these statements is apparent. This was purposeful irony, a vocalization of the denial that marked vocalist Layne Staley’s life. And while it certainly doesn’t represent an addict’s whole reality, it does capture a small aspect of it: the deceitful joy of picking a substance up and feeling like it’s finally working as intended. In many ways the song (and Dirt, the album it appears on) feels like a love letter to addiction. And it really is a love letter to this feeling, the high before the euphoria wears off. It might potentially be serenading the comfortingly familiar self-pity that keeps you trapped the next morning, too.

It is not just Layne’s lyrics that give the song its power. Jerry Cantrell has a talent for creating gritty rock songs that can withstand the drunkest of stupors. The guitar is powerful, the little details stand out. One of the most enjoyable parts of “Junkhead” is the way that the bass line subtly deviates from the rest of the instruments in the beginning of the chorus. The entire album feels like a dramatic three-day binger—complete with the unsettling and at times sickening aspects—and in desperate times, it can even serve as a substitute for one.

I will always love these songs for the comfort that they provided me during my darkest years. However, I don’t find myself revisiting Dirt very often. It is the band’s quintessential “addiction” album. Every song is about being completely consumed by one’s demons, except perhaps “Rooster” (although it can be argued that the song explores demons of a different kind). Incidentally, Jerry Cantrell wrote the lyrics to that song. Addiction was all that Layne could write about, and presumably all he could think about. This offers catharsis to a similarly predispositioned listener, desperate for temporary escape and desperate to escape their desperation. When the world seems hopeless and you don’t know what to do, sometimes you need music to scream in solidarity.

In a way, though, I’ve outgrown the songs on this album. They’re not relatable to me anymore. I revisit their debut album Facelift sometimes, as it offers some excellent rock music. “Love, Hate, Love” might be the best song they’ve ever made. Layne’s vocal power is unmatched in this album, also. If you look at live performances from the era, you can see just what a force he was before drugs stole his soul. There are still quite a few songs about drugs on this one, but they’re almost naive, in a way. The chemicals’ enchantment hadn’t worn off yet; the desperation hadn’t set in.

Their self-titled album, the band’s last album to feature Layne Staley, also usually earns a few listens. It took me a while to get into this one. Everything from the dark and at times unsettling-sounding music to the three-legged dog on the cover disturbed me. It is definitely their saddest—it sounds in many ways more hopeless than Dirt, like the last hurrah of someone who knows that his end is near. This dreadful feeling comes from the lyrics and Layne’s downright sickly voice (along with the knowledge of his tragic fate), but I am not discounting Jerry Cantrell’s massive role in the songwriting. Every single song without the lyrics would still feel the same—dark, gritty, weird, but somehow validating.

That’s a hard album to listen to (despite being potentially their best), so the one that I find myself drawn to the most is Jar of Flies. I return to this album a lot, in part because its thirty-minute length fits nicely within a train ride, in part because my tastes have changed to favor its instrumentation (as I’m less “high-strung,” I often turn away from loud distortion in favor of more mellow guitar), and mostly because it is now the one whose message speaks to me the loudest. The words are not those of a helpless addict, but of a struggling person, trying to live right and yet tempted by failure. Each song seems like a tale of a “fallen angel,” someone who has tried time and time again to better themselves, and failed.

I relate to it when I am feeling my lowest.

The sounds heard on the album are different from anything else the band has to offer. Violin, harmonica, tinny acoustic guitar. A lot of the songs have a bluesy feel to them. There’s something different in this album which seems to get better with age. “Nutshell” is a beautiful song. Listen to it. The wailing of the guitar on “Whale and Wasp” evokes sadness within the depths of my soul. Yet the softness of the acoustic guitar calms me, and the subtle sliding sound of fingers against guitar strings is downright healing. The beginning of “Don’t Follow” is great partner to any melancholy mood, and the musical U-turn the song takes at around two minutes and thirty seconds in is brilliant. Admittedly, I’ve always had a thing for the harmonica. I think Jerry wrote the lyrics to this song, and they’re some of the band’s best.

I don’t really know what my point was in all of this. It’s not really a “review”—more of a timeline of my favorite music, which conveniently stops a few years ago, leaving the soundtrack of my present train rides up to your imagination. It is in part an attempt to apologize for my lackluster output in the last few days. I’m working on something a bit more ambitious than what I’m used to, and it’s taking a while to come together. It might just be a long-winded way of admitting that I’ve been sad, and that when I’m sad, I listen to Jar of Flies.

Thank you for reading.