William DuVall has taken a leap of musical faith. After years of hardcore and rock, his inner self decided to take something he had done for many years with friends in living rooms and made it public. In other words, DuVall is letting his singer-songwriter self shine in the light. Allowing this softer voice and a borrowed acoustic guide him, he recorded One Alone and took it on tour. Now he is about to return to the road later this week after a holiday break.
Talking with DuVall a few weeks ago, the excitement in his voice exposed the excitement of what he has done. And it only took a few days to accomplish what he calls, “The very core of who I am as a singer, guitarist and songwriter.” Originally recording a demo of a song to potentially send to another singer, he had second thoughts which led to a few more songs being recorded which led to the One Alone album that he released last fall. It is an acoustic album bursting at the seams with heartfelt emotions, and in some instances, an exotic twist. From “The Veil Of All My Fears” to “Still Got A Hold On My Heart,” DuVall digs deep and pulls out something that is spiritual and beautiful.
Joining Seattle rockers Alice In Chains in 2006 (Layne Staley had passed in 2002), recording 2009’s Black Gives Way To Blue, 2013’s The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here and 2018’s Rainier Fog, DuVall was accepted by the fans. Growing up on hardcore punk, he was in bands from an early age. After moving with his mother to Atlanta from the Washington DC area, he helped form Neon Christ. With Comes With The Fall, he made five records, including an EP and live recording. All have had touches of acoustic but nothing like what One Alone encompasses.
I spoke with DuVall recently while he was in Atlanta about the intricacies of One Alone, his first time playing with AIC in Seattle and his Moorish roots.
One Alone is such an emotional album. Why did you feel it was the right time to do something so confessional and to have it be so bare bones? You’re not an old man yet so you’re not reflecting on many years.
(laughs) Yeah but it felt like time to do something different than perhaps what I’m known for. It just seemed like this particular break could involve acoustic music, where the acoustic guitar is truly the spotlight. In most of the electric rock music that I’ve done over all of these years, acoustic guitar has certainly played a role, and sometimes a very important role, but the electric music I’ve done has always been fairly dynamic, with lots of colors and shades, including acoustic shades, but never have I done anything, as you say, this stripped-down, this overtly confessional. So it just felt like uncharted territory and I like confronting the unknown.
So how did it start?
It actually started rather unintentionally with my going in to record what I thought was going to be a demo for “Till The Light Guides Me Home,” which I was considering giving to another artist to sing for an album I was considering producing for this artist. So that was the genesis, really. I just wanted the song laid down in a fixed, sort of tangible medium, like, okay, this is the song and how it goes. Then I was thinking we could use this as a jumping-off point to decide how to approach it for this album for this other artist. Once I went in and recorded it the way that I did – that is the take you hear on the album – once I had that the engineer was like, “Wow, Man, that’s actually really good as is and you actually may want to reconsider giving that song away.” (laughs) So I thought, yeah, maybe.
Also, I’d booked the afternoon for the studio and that song, “Till The Light Guides Me Home,” I’d done so quickly that I had all this extra time so I thought, well, I’m here, all set up, let me maybe lay down a few more. There were always a handful of songs within the catalog of my previous band, Comes With The Fall, that I always thought would present well as solo acoustic performances. And sometimes even way back in the day, you’d be out at a party in LA or something and people break out guitars and start singing, kind of informally, doing kind of a songwriter roundtable kind of a thing in somebody’s living room, and I would sometimes pull out a couple of those songs and kind of retool them to perform in that way, like just solo acoustic.
So I thought, I’ve always had those kinds of sitting in my back pocket, those versions of those songs, maybe I should lay down a few of those. So I did and walked out of the studio that evening with eight songs. So that was actually the genesis of the One Alone album. I didn’t know it at the time, there was certainly no conscious thought of, now I have my solo acoustic album, you know what I mean (laughs). It was just like, well, this was a great afternoon, I’ve got this batch of recordings, I don’t know what I’ll do with it – I don’t know if I’ll do anything with it – so I kind of just sat on those recordings for a while and then over time sort of circumstances in my life worked their way around to, hey, you know, perhaps this is a great time to make a break with everything you’ve done and this might be a great time to even break with the tradition, the lifelong tradition of releasing music through various bands. I’ve always been a band guy my entire life, since I was fifteen years old I’ve been a band guy, perhaps it’s time to break with that even. If ever there was an appropriate group of recordings with which to make that break and put out music under your own name rather than under a band moniker, these would be those recordings. You’ve got this one voice, one guitar recordings and it’s like it would almost feel dishonest to come up with some sort of alias to release music like that. I mean, I could do it, people do it, it’s fine. But that didn’t feel right and I thought, well, if I’m going to ever make an album and release it under my own name, this could be that album.
So I went back into the studio to do a few more songs, cause I only had the eight from the prior session. I went back in to do a few more and that is the One Alone album. The timing was just somehow right. You kind of just feel these things in your life, you know. I thought, I’ve done three albums with Alice In Chains now, we’ve done numerous world tours, I’ve got that whole catalog of music I’ve done outside of Alice In Chains, whether it’s GTO or Comes With The Fall; there’s all this stuff and it’s all great and I’m really proud of it but I think it’s time to operate in a different way and start getting used to this idea that music can come out under my own name and this is a great place to start with that. It’s perhaps a risk in terms of confronting the audience with something that’s that unexpected and I didn’t know how that part was going to work. But it was like, well, I’m just going to do it and let the chips fall where they may. And I’ve been overwhelmingly pleased with how it’s all gone, how people are receiving the music.
Did you feel comfortable being this honest by yourself?
Yeah, well, I mean, it’s nerve-wracking but it felt like this is the time to confront that particular unknown and just do it. It’s been really good and the performance aspect of it was yet another hurdle too. So releasing this music was one hurdle and then having to tour it as a one-man show, that’s yet another hurdle. It gives you pause for sure but again it’s like, well, this is part of the reason why I do this whole thing. The life of an artist is to confront different aspects of your personality and therefore confront different aspects of your fears. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t create nerves or whatever. But like with a lot of other things, you just dive in and you just do it and see how it goes.
The songs that I used to perform in an electric presentation with Comes With The Fall, the level of honesty or vulnerability with those lyrics was always there but to lay it bare like that as one voice and one guitar, it feels completely different doing them this way. Then, of course, writing new songs to accompany those songs from the catalog – things like “The Veil Of All My Fears” was written in one evening and was written the evening before it was recorded. Or even a song like “Till The Light Guides Me Home.” I’d never written anything like that before. I’m not prone to fingerpicking, that style of guitar playing is not something that I do a tremendous amount of. So writing a song based around fingerpicking is very unusual for me. Then also, the whole arc of that song is a departure for me and I’m very proud of that song.
You get those moments all too rarely as a songwriter where a song just sort of happens to you fully realized and you have a sense pretty early on that it’s something different but also very, very special and that it could be one that stands for the ages. And I feel like “Till The Light Guides Me Home” is one of those songs, one of those rare birds. So I was very happy that I obviously ended up not giving that song away (laughs).
What do you see as the strongest emotion running through this album?
I think there is a general theme of certainly introspection and coming to terms with one’s self, one’s failings certainly, and there also seems to be quite a few songs that deal with fearlessness, like being fearless enough to not only confront yourself and your own failings and mistakes but also being fearless enough to then ask for what you want and need, whether it’s out of life or out of another person or a particular relationship; to be unashamed or unabashed about asking for what you need. Confronting those aspects of yourself perhaps kept you from getting what it is that you claim to want and need out of your life, out of other people in your life, things like that. But going ahead and facing that and then still being fearless enough to go ahead and ask for it, for what you want, that seems to be sort of a central thread.
That being said, to you what is the most powerful line or lyric in this group of songs?
Oh gosh, that’s really hard to say for me. I certainly can’t pretend to be objective about any of it but I know that other people have tended to focus on a lyric in “Till The Light Guides Me Home.” It says, “It’s a wicked sorrow that makes a man do the things I’ve done.” I understand what that means to me but I’m seeing how other people interpret that for themselves, which is a very gratifying thing, people sharing their stories of what is happening in their lives and how this music is helping them deal with things going on in their lives. But yeah, it’s a pretty good line, I guess (laughs).
But it’s hard for me to talk about the lyrics in a real specific way. For me, right now, it’s mostly about how other people are taking this music and using it in their own lives, because my part of it is done, at least in terms of the record. The gratifying part for me is hearing other people’s reaction to all of this stuff. I’ve had a whole host of amazingly fearless people sharing their own experiences. I had a guy write to me saying that he had just gotten home from the birth of his first child. He had a baby boy, got home from the hospital and my album had arrived in the mail and he just put the album on and sat on his couch and wept tears of joy over all of the things that were happening in his life in that moment to the soundtrack of the One Alone album. That’s it, right; that’s as high as it gets. That to me is the highest aspiration of music, you know. So I get to hear many, many stories similar to that, people going through breakups and divorces and illnesses and they are using the music from the One Alone album to deal with these things and it’s kind of unbelievable. It’s humbling.
How did you not shed a tear while recording “Still Got A Hold On My Heart,” because it feels like you’re there, you’re at your emotional peak.
Well, I guess it’s just that professional training (laughs). I don’t know, that’s one of those songs that sort of melodically harkens back to the pre-rock era of music for me. The melody of that tune is more in line with an old standard that somebody like Hoagy Carmichael might have written or one of the Gershwins or something. Not to say that I’m on that level but the aspiration was there to evoke that kind of melodicism. So that is kind of the one note for me in that tune that I’m most proud of perhaps as a writer. As a singer, that’s a very hard song to sing so it is definitely a challenge. It’s one of those that’s like, why did I do this to myself! (laughs)
Did you use the same acoustic throughout the eleven songs or did you use several different ones?
I used the same guitar for every song. It’s a guitar that I borrowed from a dear friend of mine, Jimmy Demer. He was a drummer in Neon Christ, my band when I was a teenager. And Jim, over the years, has developed into a fine guitar player in his own right and this acoustic is a Gibson J-185 that he always has at his house. Jim knows those informal dinner party, singer-songwriter roundtables that happened – they happened here in Atlanta too and they often happened at his house. When they happened, or when they happen, that guitar comes off the wall and it always seems to wind up in my hands because I love that guitar so much.
It’s just one of those special ones. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about it’s vintage or any of that kind of thing, it’s just they had a great day at the factory that day (laughs). Whatever it’s been through since coming out of the factory, whatever that is, cause it’s beaten up and Jim has taken it to the beach and there was no special care given this guitar at all, but whatever it is with that that guitar it just seems to only grow more and more resonant and with a sweeter and sweeter voice over time. I used that guitar on recording sessions for albums I’ve produced for other artists and I’ve used it on Comes With The Fall sessions. And that day that I went in to do that demo for “Till The Light Guides Me Home” was done on that guitar. All of the songs that day were done on that guitar. So when it came time to record a few more songs to have a proper long-playing album, I went back to Jim and said, “Can I borrow that guitar again?” It just has the voice.
So yeah, that’s the guitar I used for the entire thing and I used it in the video for “Till The Light Guides Me Home,” I used it in the live performance video for “Smoke & Mirrors,” which my friend Jim actually shot that video. So it all seems to come back to that guitar and him (laughs). It’s been an integral part of the One Alone album process. Now, of course, I don’t drag that guitar out on the road with me. I wouldn’t do that to my old friend so I went and got Gibson to give me a couple of really wonderful true vintage Gibson Hummingbirds and that’s what I’ve been touring with.
When you first started learning to play guitar, what was the most difficult thing for you to get the hang of?
I think your hands, obviously, go through a lot of pain – your fingertips and your fingers themselves, the muscles in your hands. The biggest learning curve, I suppose, to conquer is getting that coordination and getting over the physical adjustment to pressing down on a bunch of metal wires for hours at a time. That’s no joke, especially for a little kid and I was a little kid when I started. So the biggest thing was just the pain of it. But I wanted it so badly that you just keep going. You give up for a minute and you come back and you keep doing that over and over again.
What kind of guitar was that first one?
My first guitar was a really beat up old nylon string acoustic that I found in my grandmother’s basement. It had long since been abandoned by my uncle and then it was resurrected by me. It was a really difficult guitar to play. The strings were a mile high off the fretboard, just terrible action. But the strings themselves were fraying, kind of coming apart, and there were not six strings on the guitar either, it was like four strings or something. But that was the beginning and eventually, I worked my way up to my first electric, which my cousin Donald bought for me with his first paycheck from the Navy. I got a Fender Mustang electric guitar, brand new, 1977model. That was the one that I really got it together on as far as serious riffing and that guitar actually took me into my first band. I wish I hadn’t gotten rid of that guitar.
Did earning a degree in Philosophy have any influence on how you write a song, the words you use and how you frame them, how you say them?
I suppose, perhaps. It’s not like a conscious thing, certainly not an intentional thing, but yeah, I would think it’s there on some level, maybe an unconscious or more subtle level, because I think anyone who is predisposed to even pursuing Philosophy in a scholastic setting, to get a degree, there’s a certain way that you’re probably inclined to organizing your thoughts anyway. And certainly you obviously have a certain set of interests that lend themselves to trying to answer the unanswerable questions of like, why are we here and what does this all mean and the nature of existence and all that. So yeah, I would think that all of that, the impetus to even pursue a degree like that along with the work that I did in order to earn that degree, would all have an effect on my songwriting on some level.
Your second show with Alice In Chains was in Seattle. How nerve-wracking was that to come in and actually play there?
Oh it was huge and it was indescribably nerve-wracking. I think I’ve probably blocked a lot of it out (laughs). Just to get through the evening, I had to do all kinds of Jedi mind tricks and everything! But what I do remember of that night is overwhelmingly positive. Obviously, there was a huge backstage scene of old friends and acquaintances of the band all back there and I remember a lot of those people going out of their way to be very kind to me and I really appreciated it.
I remember specifically hanging out with Kim Thayil [Soundgarden] a lot that night and also Bubba Dupree, who was the guitarist in a band called Void, who if you’re into the early 1980’s hardcore scene like I was, Void were a very important band in Washington DC, which is my hometown. Specifically, Void was from Columbia, Maryland, which was a suburb that I lived in for a couple of years when my mother remarried. So to have this incredible band right there in Columbia was a trip and that album that Void put out on Dischord Records, that Split album, is still one of the milestone records of that whole scene, that whole era. I’d always loved Bubba and I’d never met him so it was like, okay, I’m hanging out with Kim Thayil, who is in turn hanging out with Bubba Dupree, so I get both of these cats! (laughs) We spent the whole evening together. I think we went out someplace late night to eat and it was just really, really cool. And I remember the show being good. That whole period was very, very intense but you had these milestones and that was certainly one and it was overall a really incredible evening.
Compared to that, how are you handling these more intimate shows you’re doing on your tour? Are you even more aware of these songs emotional impact? Do you feel more naked performing them than normal AIC songs?
Yeah, totally, much more so in this setting cause, again, these are the songs that were written specifically for solo acoustic presentation or they’ve been retooled for a solo acoustic presentation. So yeah, the songs are laid bare, the lyrics are laid bare; everything about the whole setup makes everyone in the room much more vulnerable because they are watching me go through all this and they themselves are bringing whatever they’re bringing to the table. Then it’s so quiet in the room and it can be scary but it can also be comforting. Once you get into a certain groove and a certain headspace, it’s actually very comforting because you’re sort of riding this emotional wave and you can feel the vibrations from the audience riding that wave with you. And that’s where it gets really interesting and really incredibly gratifying and you all ride this wave together and arrive at the shore together and it’s really, really nice.
You have a very interesting ancestry in that you’ve traced your family back to the Moors in North Africa. Is that just the ethnicity you know about or have you learned about your actual ancestors?
I would love to know more specifics about my actual ancestors but that’s as far as we’ve gotten so far, as far as my grandmother got. So that is something I’d like to pursue further on my own. But it was really interesting to hear my grandmother talk about what life was like for her as a young girl in Delaware where she was from and the fact that she actually went to the Moors School. My grandmother was born in 1911 and she actually just passed away at 105 in 2017 on New Year’s Day, so she had a really long run.
In her nineties, we started really getting serious about having her recall things she remembered from her childhood and young adulthood so that we could document those things. So I went to Delaware with her and went to all of these different sites from her childhood and a lot of the buildings were surprisingly still standing and that was one of the buildings we went to, was this building that had been called the Moors School. Everything was segregated then, obviously very strictly between the races and between the Indians and the non-Indians. But then aside from all of that, aside from any segregation between black, white, Native American, you also had this other category that was the Moors and that was the community in which she belonged.
So her background is not slavery
To our knowledge, no. I remember a little bit of her father Joseph and he was a tough, tough, tough, tough guy. He was a farmer and he was in Delaware and owned a tremendous amount of land. I was blown away when I began to understand the scale of it as a young adult because, again, going around with my grandmother to all these different sites, she would take me to this gigantic field, and I was videotaping, so she would have me do a full 360 with the camera and say, “Now make a complete circle. Now all of the land that you see in every direction, as far as you can see, was owned by my father.” And this was just one of the lots!
You’re starting your tour back up soon
Yes, the next American run starts February 14, Valentine’s Day, in St Louis and it runs to February 29, with two shows in Seattle. Then I go to Europe in March starting in Dublin and ending May 1st in Moscow. So it’s a rather comprehensive tour of Europe for about five weeks. There are a lot more shows on the horizon for sure and I can’t wait to do them.
Band & individual portraits by Johnny Buzzerio; live photos by Andy Gordon and Leslie Michele Derrough
