Jerry Cantrell stated that he is on a break from writing songs after releasing a new album.
“Now that I’ve written this record, I probably won’t write again for another year or so,” the musician recently told AllMusic. “But I’ll be collecting the whole time.”
He added, “And I’ve already been collecting – I was sitting down for one hour with Tyler Bates yesterday, watching the Steelers lose to the Cowboys last night. And I think we came up with 16 ideas – just sitting there with two guitars, two guys, watching a football game, and a phone between us.”
Cantrell’s fourth solo album ‘I Want Blood’ came out on October 18, 2024. The album has 9 songs, each recorded with different musicians like Robert Trujillo, Duff McKagan, and Greg Puciato, among others.
“This record is a serious piece of work. It’s a motherf*cker,” Jerry said in a statement. “It’s hard, no doubt, and completely unlike ‘Brighten.’ And that’s what you want, to end up in a different place. There’s a confidence to this album. I think it’s some of my best songwriting and playing, and certainly some of my best singing.”
“I went through making Brighten and then touring it, and I hadn’t gotten to do that in almost 20 years,” he explained to Guitar Player about the process of the album. “That’s a good chunk of time in a life, you know? So I was really fired up about the experience, and once it was over, I still felt inspired, and that I hadn’t completed the creative cycle that I was in. So that’s why we now have ‘I Want Blood.'”
Cantrell also shared, “The title track is a celebration of your life and your time here. It’s written as if you were facing off in a boxing ring with time, and time is basically saying to you, ‘Come on, what d’ya got? I want blood. I want your best.'”
The rocker’s North American tour to support the new album starts on January 31 in Niagara Falls, Ontario, and ends with a homecoming show on March 9 at the Moore Theatre in Seattle.
