10 Perfect Rock Albums That Are Incredibly Sad

If you went through the entire experience that came with Alice in Chains' magnum opus Dirt, you knew that the band was not in a good headspace at the time. Going through some of the worst moments of heroin addiction, Layne Staley was playing with his own mortality, unable to shake the craving for his own vices. It would have been fine for him to take a break and try to clean up, but Jar of Flies was the moment that most of us realized that Layne was fighting a losing battle.

Being the second time the band had stripped things down to full acoustics, every one of these songs seems to have some connection to Staley's problems, like the cautionary tale of wanting to travel South on I Stay Away or the Jerry Cantrell-penned No Excuses, where he tries to speak to his writing partner about getting his act together and choosing to love him through all of the pain and turmoil that he inflicts upon himself. Even songs like Whale and Wasp seem coated in a certain haze, as if the music itself is crying out for some sort of release.

There's definitely a desire here for things to get better, but once you saw Alice appear on MTV Unplugged, you started to realize just how far gone Layne was becoming, singing the lyrics to Nutshell and resigning himself to the fact that he's probably going to end up a victim of his own inner demons. The drug culture had always been a part of the grunge movement since the beginning, but this is where the innocence of Seattle got completely snuffed out.