A Damaged Beauty

Finding flowers in a landfill

Jun 18, 2025

We’ve reached the end of another month in our Musical Zodiac - Gemini gave us a lot of room to talk about vocal harmony.

Usually, when you talk about the best of human singing, thoughts go to the sublime. Pure tones, blended voices, singing about the Divine or at least about something pretty, like love. But the human condition includes dark experiences, painful moments, and sometimes we allow our art to lean into those dark and painful moments.

Like finding a daisy in a dump, we learn from darker art that beauty isn’t always a dainty, delicate thing—it can be a reminder that love is not a sign of weakness, but instead, that toughest part of ourselves that drives us to push on, even when the world around us is burning down.

credit: Redditor MattFiler at r/DunderMifflin

The Rise of Grunge

I recently clicked on a poll1 here on Substack that posed an impossible question. “It is 1991, and you can only see one of these bands—which do you choose?”

Soundgarden
Pearl Jam
Alice In Chains
Nirvana

Nirvana was winning the poll by a landslide, but that’s not who I voted for. It was tough to pick, but my choice has to be Alice in Chains. As much as I love all four of these bands, there was always one thing about Alice in Chains that elevated them for me, and that thing was the intense vocal harmony between Jerry Cantrell and Layne Staley.

From the beginning, the music that was classified as “grunge” borrowed from the core of every genre around it. The heavy riffs and distortion of metal, the confessional and introspective lyrics of Americana’s singer-songwriters, and the disruptive, anti-commercial ethos of punk found infinite pathways to the recording studios.

GenXers like me love irony the way we loved flannel and scraggly facial hair, so we took these bands that were writing about tough, non-commercial subjects and put them on the goddamn charts. We were tired of the mindlessness of the “party all night long” crowd, and we chafed at the polished perfection and implied preachiness of R&B-based pop. We wanted art that could channel the generational trauma and pain from our parents and the fear we were facing as we entered their world.

And that’s what Jerry Cantrell did.

CW: graphic depictions of warfare and violence

If that example is too harsh for you, this one is a little more accessible, while still capturing the zeitgeist of a generation of kids that felt boxed in by the neglect and expectations of the “Me Generation”:

If you asked me to distill what the Grunge Movement was into one moment, it is Cantrell and Staley’s exquisite harmony as they sing, “Won’t you come and save me?”

A Bottle for Your Lightning

Tight vocal harmonies are not unknown in metal or grunge, but they aren’t common. Most bands anchor their sound in their guitars and/or solo vocals. Alice in Chains was almost unique in putting Cantrell and Staley out front together. And examples of their vocals carrying good songs over the line into great abound. Their self-titled album from 1995 featured “Heaven Beside You” and “Over Now,” two songs that are sure to spark enthusiastic sing-alongs among fans to this day.

Unfortunately, as consistently great as their output was, 1996 seemed to mark the end for the band, as Layne Staley’s substance abuse problems led to a hiatus that looked like it would be permanent after he died in 2002 at age 34.

For a few years, there was no indication that Alice in Chains would be a band again. Even when they started performing together after appearing in a 2005 benefit concert, there was no sense that they would try to replace Staley and release any more records.

But they eventually did.

Not the Same—Still Great

None of the surviving members of Alice in Chains “had to” get the band back together. They were all successful, working musicians, with solo and side projects that paid the bills and kept them in front of welcoming audiences. But I like the way Sean Kinney distilled their motivation for making music together again:

We're not doing this for money; there is no money in the music business anymore. Jerry and I funded the whole album, and we spent lots of our own money, because we believe in this. And one of the reasons I'm doing this is so more light is turned on to something where the light was turned off.
AiC drummer Sean Kinney, in Guitar World2

Singer and rhythm guitarist William Duvall was brought in as a permanent member, singing Staley’s vocal parts when the band performed older material, but adamantly not “replacing” Staley. There’s a distinction there that should be respected, and I think the members have demonstrated that.

More importantly (to me, a member of the audience), is the band’s ability to keep making music that is relevant and true to their purpose. They still thumb their noses at that ironic line between selling their pain and defying convention. The second single from their 2009 comeback album, Black Gives Way to Blue, wrestles with themes related to the hard road Cantrell and his friends have traveled… with those exquisitely tight harmonies threaded throughout:

Ah—Tears have filled my bones
Ah—Years expended, gone
I hung my guns and put em away, oh yeah
The trick of the trade, and by the way, oh yeah
California, I'm fine
Somebody check my brain

Maybe it’s a confession of my age, but there is something about their story of weathering the last two decades only to keep pushing the stone up the hill that resonates with me. I hear those voices, brilliant blooms pushing up through gritty guitar riffs, and it reminds me of everything we’ve weathered.

We’ve been dirt poor; we’ve spent years on overtime. We’ve been sleep deprived and over-caffeinated, and still, we keep trying to make whatever we can out of our lives. And on the journey, our favorite artists keep reminding us that they’re there, too; that they are staying on task, and doing what we have to do to push our way up out of the trash that sometimes overwhelms us.

They are literally still rockin’.