Natalie Zina Walschots at Exclaim.ca recently spoke with ALICE IN CHAINS drummer Sean Kinney about the band's new album, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here. An excerpt is available below:

Natalie: Would you say that you return the investment that your dedicated fans have in you by being equally dedicated to the music you produce? One of the things that has always defined Alice In Chains is that every single song you have ever put out has been deeply personal, something that you have emotionally and intellectually invested in.

Sean: "I just thought all the songs were about chicks and cars. You make us sound a lot cooler and smarter. As far as I'm concerned everything was about partying and chicks and cars and money and like, rims on cars. 22-inch rims. Wait, what is 22 inches in centimetres? You're going to have to change that if you're in Canada."

Natalie: But this record, at least, is not all about chicks and cars. There's material here about religion and the way it makes people act, the way that it does evil. In the past it seems that the songs were more intimate, about what individual members were suffering through, and now it's a lot more external.

Sean: "Yeah, there are some things that are more external, but a lot of those things are intimate and internal too. The dinosaur title as well, that was something Jerry (Cantrell) and I had talked about forever, and we're not taking any sides. Even the song 'The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here' goes back and forth. We don't really have a stance on anything beyond, 'What's up with that?' I have a hard time personally believing that some evil little guy ran around thousands of years ago and hid hundreds of million-year-old bones all over the globe to fool you into something. That's a bit far-fetched for me but some people believe that. Cool, believe whatever you want, everybody believes in something. It's just when you get into that, what I conceive of as 'I'm right, you're wrong.' No, you're not. Everybody has the right to believe in whatever they want. We're not really picking too much at it, it's more like a conversation that we were having for a long time, and then we wrote a song, and we dug the tune, and then we named the album that. And if that gets some conversations started with people, cool. If not, it's not really this great political statement."

"Basically it is a question: 'What's with that?' I also look at it this way: if we were alive a few thousand years ago, you and I would be certain, everyone was certain that the world was flat. If you said the earth was round, and they heard us saying it, then they'd hang us, burn us, stone us. The fact that the earth was flat was a fact. You could sail right off the edge of it. Now, because of science, we know that the earth is round. I'm pretty sure there are no more "flat-earthers" out there. What is fact does change if you are open to change. As long as people are open to change and hearing other people's ideas, then beliefs and science can work together and as a culture we'll move forward. If you just go to your room, shut the door and deny reality, and don't want to know more, then you can do that too, but you can't go blaming everybody else for trying to change the way that it is."

Go to this location for the complete interview.

AIC's fifth studio album, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here, landed at #2 on The Billboard 200 chart selling 62,000 copies in it's first week out in the US. The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here also lands on the Canadian Album Chart at #2.

“We don’t really have too big of a mission,” drummer Sean Kinney told BraveWords about the new material recently. “We try to write a bunch of songs, songs we like. The same way on every record, we write songs that we like, probably guided unintentionally by just where we are in life, and what people are kind of gravitating to or thinking about. Try to write songs, play some songs, and just decide which ones we all think are the best at the time, and record them and put them in a sequence that flows the way we want it to. Same goddamn selfish reasons we always do. You know, there’s very little... there’s no thought of anyone else. We just do what we do and just put it out, and you go through the hoops. You never realize it until you get to now. Oh, okay, talk about it, people start hearing it. You always want people to dig what you’re doing, but we’re kind of... we’re not a band designed for the masses, and we’ve learned that long ago. So we try live up to our standards of our bar that we set for ourselves, and if we don’t think we have it, I don’t think we’d be talking right now. We’re never in a position where we have to make a record on some timeline, where the record company has control and picks the singles. We’ve never been that group. We’ve always picked our singles, all the artwork we do, we do everything, and then work with the record label for their sake, and their infrastructure, and get it to people—if anybody wants it, then maybe they can get a hold of it. That’s how it works. I mean, we don’t have an A&R; guy picking singles. Who’s in rehearsals hearing out records. They hear them when we let them hear them. Not like they have a right to hear them.”

Read more at BraveWords.