Nancy Wilson’s New Album Features Reworked Tribute to Layne Staley
Nancy Wilson's upcoming debut solo album You and Me features a reworked version of her song "The Dragon," which she wrote for Layne Staley back in the '90s. The song initially appeared on her band Roadcase Royale's album First Things First in 2017, but she recreated it for her solo effort.
Wilson is good friends with the members of Alice in Chains, so she was around to witness Staley's struggles with addiction before he succumbed to them in 2002. As mentioned during an interview with FaceCulture, she wrote "The Dragon" as an open letter to him before he died, but hadn't released it because she didn't feel it was a Heart song.
"It was a very interesting situation in the early '90s in Seattle, because there were a lot of those guys around that time which were all battling with their own addictions. Even Chris Cornell later, as it turned out, he had his own issues later on. But that was the time," Wilson recalled.
"Layne Staley was one sweetheart of a person who you could really see his weakness for his addiction and how much it appeared, from a distance, that he was not gonna survive it. And it took a long, long time, but it was really obvious that he was not going to win that contest. So that's why I wrote the song at the time when he was still around — I wrote it then."
The rocker explained that she never showed the song to the Alice in Chains frontman because of how personal it was. But, she did show it to Jerry Cantrell.
"I played it for him a couple of different times in a few different situations. I think he just didn't wanna be part of it because it was too painful for him — because Layne was his brother mainly. So I just figured out how to finish it on my own, and it finally found its home," she said.
Watch the full interview below.
You and Me will be out tomorrow (May 7). The album also features a tribute to another fallen rock hero — Eddie Van Halen — an instrumental titled "4 Edward." Pre-order the record here.
Nancy Wilson Interview With FaceCulture
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