“Fear the Voices” by Alice In Chains

"Fear the Voices" sat in the vault for seven years. Alice in Chains cut it in 1992 as an outtake from the Dirt sessions, and it didn't surface until 1999, on the Music Bank box set and as a promo single, which made it the last single the band released with Layne Staley singing and the only one bassist Mike Starr helped write, alongside Staley and Jerry Cantrell. Dave Jerden produced it with the band and mixed it.

Cantrell traced it to the demo tape the band made for "the Crowe movie", the same fruitful tape that yielded "Would?", part of Sap and the first steps toward Dirt, just as they were sinking into their blackest period. It seems to take aim at censorship, nodding to Washington governor Booth Gardner signing a bill on March 20, 1992 that threatened jail for selling a minor an album a judge deemed erotic.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.