William DuVall has been in bands for nearly four decades — hardcore kid in Neon Christ, Atlanta scene lifer in Comes With the Fall, and, for the last dozen years, the voice who helped Alice in Chains walk back into daylight after the longest of shadows. But it took until 2019 for him to do the obvious: make a record under his own damn name.
“I’ve always been a band guy since I was a teenager,” he says. “It took a lot of soul-searching just to put something out under my own name. But if there was ever going to be a time, it was now. And if there was ever going to be an album to do it with, it was this one. One guitar, one voice. Nothing else.”
He called the album One Alone — a title so blunt it practically dares you to find hidden meaning. “Once I had that title in my head, it couldn’t be anything else,” he shrugs. “Even when it was just eight songs on my iPod, I called it One Alone.”
The setup was accidental. He went into a studio just to demo a single, “Till the Light Guides Me Home,” and by the end of the afternoon had knocked out eight tracks. “I thought, I’m here, I might as well throw down a few others. Songs I’d already done with Comes With the Fall, but I always felt could work stripped back. By the time I walked out, I had the genesis of a record.”
The breakthrough wasn’t stylistic — DuVall has always blurred genres. It was psychological. “Most people say ‘solo album’ and they’ve still got a producer, engineers, session guys. This was solo as you can get. And that was the hurdle — coming to grips with putting it out under my own name.”
The record opens with a line that could be diary entry or protest sign: dark days tearing me down again. “That works on a lot of levels,” DuVall says. “Personal, societal, whatever the listener needs. My greatest aspiration for this album is that it might become a friend to somebody.”
You can hear the philosophy degree peeking through in his talk about “the light.” He grins at the suggestion. “That stuff is always there, consciously or not. I’ve always been fascinated by our existence, by ritual, by whether there’s a higher consciousness. It’s not about religion, per se — more about the possibility of an elevated state of being. That’s always going to creep into the songs.”
Even a tune called “Chains Around My Heart” didn’t make him think of the band he fronts. “Funny, I never thought of that,” he says, shaking his head. “That was just an old song I always felt should’ve had more lives. It never found its proper way into the world until now.”
Playing these songs live is another dare. “It’s a big ask of people,” DuVall admits. “To come out and watch one guy with a guitar carry an entire show. So I had to be sure the songs could hold up under that. That was the main thing — which ones survive being that naked.”
The past hovers anyway. 2019 also marked ten years since Black Gives Way to Blue, the comeback Alice in Chains album that dropped the same day DuVall became a father. “Last day of tracking, I had to rush to the hospital,” he says. “I shaved off this gigantic Rip Van Winkle beard in the bathroom at Henson Studios because I didn’t want my son’s first sight of me to be terrifying. Todd [the band’s videographer] was filming the whole thing. Then I went straight to the hospital. That was the day.”
Talk about monumental. “On the one hand, I was in this pressure cooker — the band trying to resurrect itself with the whole world watching. On the other, I was becoming a parent for the first time. It was overwhelming, but it grounded me. I couldn’t waste energy worrying about public reaction to the album. I had more important things to do. In a weird way, I think that saved me.”
Looking back at that record is like watching strangers. “We resolved not to shave until it was done, so Cantrell and I looked like Grizzly Adams. Seeing the old footage now is wild — it’s like looking at a bunch of other dudes. That whole period was intense, emotionally and externally. So much noise around us. We spent all our energy blocking it out so we could keep laughing in the studio, keep being ourselves.”
He pauses, then laughs again. “Yeah, a lot of facial hair. ZZ Top would’ve been jealous.”
One Alone may be as far from Alice’s layered sludge as DuVall has ever gone, but the attitude is the same: dive in, see if you drown. “It was overwhelming most of the time,” he says, “but like riding a huge wave, you surrender to where the water’s going to take you. That’s how I approached both things — the album and becoming a parent. It’s the same feeling, really. Survive or don’t. But keep moving.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
