I think that was my one biggest memory of Layne, just his laughter. He's still not only my favorite rock voice but probably my favorite laugh in the world. I would always be amazed by all the negative stuff written about Layne, because he had such a capacity for fun. Like, shit, I'm hanging out with the wrong guy! He was just really funny. And he had developed friendships with about 20 people there, a bunch of hot American models. We walked in the bar, me and Jerry, and we just see this big flame and we turn around and it's our singer we've been looking for just having a great time. But as my friend Lemmy would say, "We all gotta die." It's just a drag when it's about 50 years too early. I thought it was a very special and important record for us. This Black Gives Way to Blue album was kind of a healing album for us, saying goodbye to Layne on some level. We're not looking at the audience, we're looking back at Layne, and it's pretty cool that there's still that song for us. And I look and see me and Jerry and Sean looking the wrong way. I get a little teary-eyed, and sometimes when we're doing the arena runs especially, they'll have some video footage of Layne. That song still gets me choked up whenever I play it. And in "Nutshell," he really put everything in a nutshell for everybody. 1 for me is "Nutshell." Layne was very honest with his songwriting. He didn't let popular trends affect how he wrote. He was definitely not afraid to take any chances. If anyone else came in and started singing that, we would have laughed it out of the room, but now it's just part of the history of that song. Take the way "We Die Young" begins, where he would just make a really weird and cool humming sound. YOU MENTIONED HOW HE WOULD BUILD SONGS FROM VOCAL HARMONIES. He was just such an original American voice. And every one of those singers, too, sounds different from the other guy. I always thought that being sequestered in the Pacific Northwest, there was time for bands like Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana to marinate as bands and discover their sound before they were put on a world stage. 1, we were laughing to ourselves like, "Maybe we should've spent 12 days on it, or two weeks, or a month." But that was the cool thing about that scene at the time. We wrote, recorded, and mixed Jar of Flies in 10 days, between two tours. We trusted him.ĭID HE LABOR LONG ON THINGS LIKE HARMONIES? He just went in there and would just dig. He didn't always know exactly what he was going for. He just had a really good sense of the song as a whole. And he would bring in the main vocal, and it would tie all these radical harmonies together. And he'd go, "No, just hold on." So we'd let him go. He would do it almost backwards-he would do all the harmonies first, and a lot of the harmonies sounded out of key or something, like, it didn't quite work. It was really nice to watch Layne approach a vocal line. Looking back, we had just a special, magical chemistry. The first song I co-wrote with him was "A Little Bitter," for the Last Action Hero soundtrack, and then the two songs I brought in for Jar of Flies were "I Stay Away" and "Rotten Apple." Layne wrote the melodies for all of those songs. WHAT WAS LAYNE LIKE TO WORK WITH ON SONGWRITING? He just had this compelling energy about him. But no matter who was in the room, everybody would always look at Layne. We'd go to these Grammy parties with people like Robert De Niro, Michael Bolton, and Nicollette Sheridan-all these crazy celebrities-and then you've got these wacky grunge guys walking in. I remember one time going to the Grammys with him. He wasn't the kind of guy to want to be the center of attention. He was always very supportive of other bands. I never heard him talk shit about anybody. He was just such a real human being, and such a good human, too. You could hear it all the way across the room, and there was just, like, realness to it. The main thing for me was just his laugh.
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