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And it’s not lost on any member of Alice that even as they move forward, it’s impossible to escape their past. Kinney says, “Sometimes people ask us, ‘Wouldn’t Layne have been pissed off that we did this?’ And I tell them it would have been the opposite: he would have been pissed off that it took us so long to do this. 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.”

As for Cantrell, he’s back to working on his Bogner and tinkering with his tone. He pauses for a second, as if he’s looking for something in the distance that only he can see. “Life is pretty good today in spite of all the stuff we’ve gone through,” he says, the dark laugh now absent. “It hasn’t all been bad. We’ve toured around the world, we’ve lost some friends, we buried a dear friend, and somebody that you just can’t fucking replace, and then we’ve chosen by circumstance to get together again. That turned into ‘maybe we can fucking do this.’ And that turned into this.”

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