At his 2025 tour kickoff, Jerry Cantrell played an Alice In Chains deep cut for the first time since 1993.
The rocker’s 2025 solo tour in support of his latest album I Want Blood kicked off Friday night (Jan. 31) in Ontario, Canada. He played a career-spanning 17-song set that included hits from Alice’s ’90s albums and all of his solo records [via Setlist.fm].
But it was a pretty big deal — and special surprise — when he played the opening chord of the Dirt track “Hate to Feel,” which hasn’t been played by any member of Alice In Chains since 1993 when Layne Staley was still alive.
While Cantrell has always been the primary songwriter in Alice, “Hate to Feel” was one of several that Staley penned on his own, and he contributed guitar-playing to it as well. The track was played a total of 88 times between October of 1991 and November of ’93, according to Setlist.fm’s Tour Statistics page on the band.
“Layne came into his own as a guitar player, and he wrote a couple of fantastic tunes on the guitar with ‘Hate to Feel’ and ‘Angry Chair,’” Cantrell told Billboard in an interview around the 30th anniversary of Dirt in late 2022.
READ MORE: Jerry Cantrell Reflects on New Music + Alice In Chains’ Legacy
“I love those tunes, and I also love the fact that he got the bug to pick up the guitar. I remember he showed us those tunes and he was thinking about doing them for a record on his own… Then he played them for us and we were all like, ‘F–k, those are cool. We should do those.’ And he reluctantly agreed. And we cut them, and they turned out to be two amazing songs that very much fit the record, for sure.”
See fan-filmed footage of Cantrell’s performance of “Hate to Feel” with his band (Greg Puciato, Roy Mayorga, Eliot Lorango and Zach Throne) below, and the full setlist from the night underneath.
Jerry Cantrell, ‘Hate to Feel’ (Live 2025)
Jerry Cantrell Setlist – Jan. 31
1. “Psychotic Break”
2. “Them Bones”
3. “Vilified”
4. “Afterglow”
5. “Atone”
6. “Off the Rails”
7. “Cut You In”
8. “My Song”
9. “I Want Blood”
10. “Had to Know”
11. “Down in a Hole”
12. “Angel Eyes”
13. “Hate to Feel”
14. “Would?”
Encore
15. “Brighten”
16. “Held Your Tongue”
17. “Rooster”
[via Setlist.fm]
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