"We Die Young" became a top five metal track at the time of its release. The version of the song "Killing Yourself" is exclusive to this EP a faster-tempo demo version was later released on Music Bank. The studio version was included on the compilation albums Music Bank (1999) and The Essential Alice in Chains (2006). A demo version of "We Die Young" was released on Nothing Safe: Best of the Box (1999), the only song released on the compilation which was not available on Music Bank. "We Die Young" and "It Ain't Like That" were released on the band's debut album, Facelift, later that year (1990). The EP was rereleased for Record Store Day 2022. The EP was a promotional only release issued before the band's first full-length album Facelift and has since gone out of print, with copies of the EP now fetching up to 100 dollars on trading sites such as eBay. Release Ī CD version of the EP exists, however this only includes the title track and features artwork different from the vinyl/cassette version. The sight of a 10 year old kid with a beeper and a cell phone dealing drugs equaled "We Die Young" to me. So I was riding the bus to rehearsal and I saw all these 9, 10, 11 year old kids with beepers dealing drugs. I'd just temporarily moved in with Susan Silver because Sean and I had just had a fight. In the liner notes of 1999's Music Bank box set collection, guitarist Jerry Cantrell said of the title track: Upon signing with Columbia, Alice in Chains made it clear that they were willing to play ball on major label, mainstream terms too for the We Die Young EP, the band selected three songs from their book which most closely resembled the swaggering, crotch-grabbing norm, and played them to the hilt." The band had the chops and a sound that could pass as similar to the metal of the day (well, at least some of the time), and they were at least as good as Skid Row, Warrant, Living Colour and Winger – who were all getting a lot of attention at the time – so that Alice in Chains would even get a cursory glance from the majors seemed inevitable. This was a promo-only EP released on vinyl and cassette, and is thus a sought-after collector's item amongst Alice in Chains fans.īill Adams of Ground Control Magazine, reviewing Alice in Chains discography wrote "For anyone who was already paying attention to Alice in Chains by 1990, that the band was signed to a major label (they were the second (after Soundgarden) of the more mainstream “ grunge” bands to get signed, actually) likely didn't come as much of a surprise. It was released in July 1990 and is their first studio EP. So throwback to 1994 with me and revisit this classic track here.We Die Young is a song and single EP by the American rock band Alice in Chains, engineered and co-produced by Dave Jerden. It sounds so much more raw and real than so much of the music out there right now, it’s refreshing in its grunginess. Words for anyone fighting their own personal battles.īut I think it’s simply the sound of the song the emotion and music that really hit me this year. Lyrically, the track is powerfully introspective “We chase misprinted lies, We face the path of time, And yet I fight, and yet I fight This battle all alone”. The sparse acoustic chords and Stanley’s mournful vocals touched a nerve I didn’t expect. Listening to Chuck Klosterman’s nineties Spotify playlist (in honor of his new book about said decade), I heard Alice in Chain‘s “Nutshell” officially for the first time (I had previously heard a Ryan Adams cover of it) and I thought it was beautiful. I’m happy to say that finally changed this year. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to like and appreciate a number of songs by these bands, though with Alice In Chains, the only songs of theirs that I knew and liked were from the post-Layne Stanley line-up. I was eight when NEVERMIND was released, and growing up in LA, you couldn’t turn on KROQ without hearing Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots or Alice In Chains blasting out. I have to admit something: I was never a big fan of grunge growing up.
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