SAP

RECORD NOTES

JAR OF FLIES’ TWIN SOUL I always listen to Sap immediately after Jar of Flies. My playlist is arranged that way. When the final notes of “Swing on This” disappear, Sap begins. The two records have become inseparable in my mind—not one album followed by a smaller, earlier EP, but two works belonging to the same emotional world. That is why I call Sap the twin soul of Jar of Flies. Five songs. Well, technically four listed songs and one hidden track. Spotify gives me only the first four. The missing fifth song is “Love Song,” an intentionally bizarre piece in which the band members swapped instruments: Sean Kinney sang and played piano, Layne played drums, Mike Starr took the guitar, and Jerry played bass. Maybe Spotify listened to it and said, “No la. Four songs enough.” The EP begins with “Brother.” We know who Jerry is singing to: his younger brother, David.

Jerry’s parents divorced when the boys were young. Jerry remained with his mother, while David went to live with their father. The separation lasted six or seven years, during which the brothers barely saw one another. Jerry later described “Brother” as his attempt to build a bridge across those missing years. That knowledge changes the song. It is not simply about missing a brother who lives far away. It carries the guilt of an older brother looking backwards and realising that the younger boy may have needed him. Jerry has admitted that he was hard on David when they were children. Then divorce divided the family before either of them was old enough to understand what they were losing. By the time Jerry wrote the song, all he could do was send his voice across the distance. Perhaps songs can become bridges when ordinary words arrive too late.

Jerry sings the lead, with Ann Wilson of Heart appearing behind him. Her voice does not overpower the song. It seems to hover around it like a family memory—something warm, distant and slightly unreachable. Then comes “Got Me Wrong.” Honestly, I have never dug deeply into its lyrics. I know there is a story inside it, but for now, I prefer to remain with its sound. And what a surprising sound it is. Here is Alice in Chains—the darkest doom-grunge-metal-whatever-you-want-to-call-them band— playing something that feels light, warm and almost sweet. The guitars seem to open a window inside the EP. Jerry and Layne trade and combine their voices without dragging the song into complete darkness. Maybe one day I will sit down and properly enter its lyrics. But not every song needs to be dissected immediately.

Sometimes we should be allowed to love the way a song moves before asking what it means. For now, I want to stay inside its music. Then comes “Right Turn.” This one makes me smile whenever I look at the CD cover because the credit reads: Track 3. “Right Turn” – Alice Mudgarden. Not Alice in Chains. Alice Mudgarden. For one song, Alice in Chains invited Chris Cornell of Soundgarden and Mark Arm of Mudhoney into the room. It was not literally all three complete bands forming a supergroup, but the name captures the spirit perfectly: three corners of the Seattle scene briefly meeting inside one song. What fascinates me most is the perspective of the lyrics. Most relationship songs are told from one side—the singer telling us what the other person did. Occasionally, we receive both sides: his story and her story. But “Right Turn,” as I hear it, gives us three voices: Her. Him. And us.

The relationship itself becomes a third character. The two people are no longer merely accusing one another or defending themselves. They are standing beside the remains of something they created together, examining what caused it to break. “Us” has been injured too. That is unique, man. A relationship is normally treated as something two people possess. Here, it feels like a living thing with its own wounds—something born between them that can suffer and die separately from either individual. All three perspectives eventually arrive at the same truth: Everyone is hurt. Something to ponder on. And I love the ending. Jerry, Layne and Mark Arm bring their voices together while Chris Cornell rises behind them with that magical wail of his. Cornell does not merely sing over the others; he tears open the roof of the song.

For a brief moment, four of Seattle’s most distinctive voices occupy the same piece of music. Then comes “Am I Inside?” This song could easily have belonged on Jar of Flies. It lives in the same emotional territory: addiction, depression, loneliness and a man wandering through himself, uncertain whether he still recognises the person inside. Jerry composed the music, but the lyrics were written by Layne. When I discovered that, everything made sense. Yeah. This is Layne’s territory. Very Layne. Ann Wilson returns here, but the warmth she brought to “Brother” feels different now. In “Am I Inside?” her voice becomes almost ghostly. Layne sounds like a man walking alone through an internal maze, while Ann seems to answer him from somewhere beyond its walls. I love this song so much that I once borrowed its title for a story of my own.

My “Am I Inside?” was about a middle-aged man blanketed by fear—the fear of losing everything he loves, the fear of what may happen next, and perhaps the fear of discovering that he no longer understands himself. But unlike the character I hear in the song, my character eventually learns to confront those fears and overcome them. The title fitted because both stories ask the same unsettling question: When fear, depression or addiction has covered every part of you, is the real person still somewhere inside? Sap arrived two years before Jar of Flies. It already carried many of the emotional themes the later EP would explore more fully: fractured families, relationships collapsing under incompatible expectations, loneliness, depression and the difficulty of locating yourself beneath all that weight. It was also created and performed in unusual ways.

Jerry stepped forward as a lead singer after Layne encouraged him. Ann Wilson moved through two songs like a visiting spirit. Chris Cornell and Mark Arm helped create Alice Mudgarden for a single track. In the hidden finale, the band abandoned their usual instruments entirely. Unlike Jar of Flies, Sap does not form one continuous story in my imagination. Its songs do not weave themselves into the same clear journey from temptation to destruction, hope and doubt. But that does not make it lesser. I have never felt that Sap underperformed beside Jar of Flies. I do not hear it as an early experiment that the band later perfected. Each has its own identity. Jar of Flies is more cohesive, but Sap is intimate, spontaneous and beautifully strange. One tells a complete story. The other opens four different doors into four wounded rooms.

Yet they carry the same darkness, the same fragile warmth and the same understanding that heaviness does not always require loud guitars. Sometimes the heaviest things can be whispered. To me, they are equals. Not siblings competing for attention. Twin souls.