Jerry Cantrell is a creature of the night.
“My fucking brain is a pain sometimes to shut off. I’m kind of a vampire by nature; I normally exist pretty late. I don’t really go to sleep until about 4 or 5 in the morning. I’ve been living road hours my whole life, so I wake up about the crack of noon. I’ve always felt like those are some of my more creative hours because the brain is still turning at those late hours and if your head is keeping you up at night, maybe it’s a good idea to exercise what your head is coming up with and turn it into some music, some ideas and that’s kind of my method in a nutshell,” Cantrell tells Orlando Weekly.
Cantrell, throughout all the restless years of his long career, has become a rock legend for his soulful vocals, songwriting skills and heavy-groove guitar work in both 1990s grunge band Alice in Chains and his award-winning solo work.
A founding member of Alice in Chains, Cantrell’s distinctive playing combined downtuned heavy guitar riffs with melodic and somber passages. Indeed, Cantrell wrote some of the band’s most popular songs, including “Would?,” “Them Bones” and “Rooster.”
Almost a year after the release of his latest solo album, I Want Blood, Cantrell has kicked off another leg of U.S. tour dates, complete with a stop at Orlando’s House of Blues Wednesday. I Want Blood is Cantrell at his best — dark, grimy, oppressive and yet undeniably catchy, with riffs that originate in the hips, not the head.
“The reaction [to] playing that stuff live has been really strong, as well as material from the older records. And that’s always satisfying when you feel like you’re continuing to grow and create new music and have it kinda seamlessly fit with some of the standout tracks from [earlier] albums of your career and stuff. There’s definitely a good handful of songs on this record that really translate live well,” Cantrell says.
Also this year, Cantrell released a deluxe version of I Want Blood, featuring spoken-word versions of every song on the album. Cantrell’s narrations are accompanied by a dramatic score composed by Vincent Jones and featuring members of Ministry, Team Sleep and Stolen Babies.
“I don’t think I’ve ever done anything like that before, it was just kind of an idea that I followed through with. It was actually toward the end of the project, I was trying to figure out something special that we could do, and I thought of spoken word,” says Cantrell.
“I recorded all the tracks, and then it felt like it wasn’t enough. We were kind of out of time and we needed to deliver all these tracks to make sure it remained on the timeline to get printed into physical form, so I called up all my collaborators from over the last couple of records. I had just written a record full of music, so I didn’t really wanna write a whole other backing track to the spoken-word thing. I called everybody and asked if they would contribute. Everybody answered with some really great ideas and we put them together and it turned out to be a pretty cool little feature.”
Back to matters vampiric, Cantrell has also done work this year on the soundtrack for Ryan Coogler’s critically acclaimed horror film Sinners. Collaborating with Ludwig Göransson, who composed the film’s original score, the pair came out with “In Moonlight” as a bonus track for the Sinners soundtrack album.
“Ludwig said Ryan had been listening to a lot of AIC, and the movie was supposed to come out in maybe like three weeks when I got the call and they wanted to take one of the main themes of Ludwig’s and turn it into a song,” Cantrell says. “I met Ludwig and his wife, Serena, [who] took me down to see a screening of the movie so I could get the feel of what it was about because I wanted to immerse myself in it. I watched the screening, wrote down some lyrics, got an emotion and worked with Ludwig and in a couple of weeks, we came out with ‘In Moonlight’ for the album.”
“In Moonlight” expands on the main theme of the film’s score. Cantrell, already on record as a vampire, lends his voice to blend grungy sound with raw blues befitting of Sinners’ 1930s Mississippi setting.
“I think I was always pretty enamored with horror movies, and stories like Stephen King’s, one of my favorite authors to this day. I kind of dig the horror imagery. Black Sabbath is one of my favorite bands. It’s fun playing around with those kinds of darker, heavier things,” Cantrell says.
His career has spanned roughly four decades, but time has done nothing to deter Cantrell’s enthusiasm for making music and playing shows.
“I’m not looking too far back or too far in the future, just where I’m so excited about it. Music is something I have a passion for that really hasn’t changed. I just love music, I love making music. I appreciate that there are other artists who do, you know? It’s a pretty worthy effort, and I’m pretty lucky to be able to have created a career doing that along with my friends and other like-minded individuals,” Cantrell says.
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This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2, 2025 and Best of Orlando (R) 2025.