Steve Baltin of Grammy.com recently spoke with ALICE IN CHAINS songwriter, guitarist and vocalist Jerry Cantrell about the band's new album, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here, which is due on May 28th. An excerpt follows:

Did the delay resulting from your shoulder surgery affect the album at all in terms of writing?

"We don't start until we're ready, you can't really start unless you've got ideas to work on (laughs)."

"Usually there's a period of accumulating riffs and ideas and generally a lot of the stuff happens in odd places and on the road, dressing rooms, soundchecks, [and] warming up before a show. There's always a camera or an iPhone and anytime something happens where you perk up or somebody perks up, then you put that down and what you're doing is depositing it in the account for later withdrawal. So by the time the tour was done there was a good 20 or 30 little riffs or ideas to go through and Black Gives Way To Blue was exactly the same way. It's fairly similar, it's just a couple years later. We couldn't have been prouder of how [Black Gives Way To Blue] played out, so we decided to do it again. I think we took a step up, maybe even two."

Was there a moment in the writing process where you felt like the album was taking a step up?

"Yeah, before I had the surgery I think I demoed 'Voices' really quick, that was a kind of quick song and came together within a couple of days of just me messing around here at the house. It was right after tour and it was a good, strong song and so I sent it around to everybody and everybody liked it and I thought, F***, that's good. That was the first thing that came together on the record, so I knew there was a good song there. And then during the process of rehab, the riff for 'Stone' [developed] — I still have the voice recording, it's hilarious. I didn't write that on guitar, I just started hearing something in my head. [I was] watching TV, and my arm's all f***ed up, so I grabbed the phone and started humming the riff into the phone and that's where that song came from. So once I was able to demo that and fill that one out, I knew that one was pretty strong too. We got into a couple of different studios and we just sat up and recorded jams, worked through the s*** we had, and Nick (Raskulinecz, producer) was involved in that process as well, even though he was working on the RUSH record [Clockwork Angels] and a bunch of other stuff."

To read the inteview in its entirety, click here.

The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here contains the following 11 songs:

‘Voices’

‘Low Ceiling’

‘Stone’

‘The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here’

‘Hollow’

‘Lab Monkey’

‘Hung On A Hook’

‘Pretty Done’

‘Breath On A Window’

‘Choke’

‘Phantom Limb’