Mad Season recorded “Above” in the winter of 1994 at Bad Animals Studio in Seattle, and Mike McCready later said the whole thing took about seven days. Layne Staley needed a few more days to finish his vocals. That’s it. Ten songs, one studio, a handful of rehearsals, and a band that had only played four shows together before they walked in. The speed is almost beside the point, though, because “Above” sounds like it was made by people who had been waiting a long time to say something.
The four members of Mad Season came from three of the most prominent bands in the Seattle scene. McCready played guitar in Pearl Jam. Staley fronted Alice in Chains. Drummer Barrett Martin came from Screaming Trees. Bassist John Baker Saunders had a background in Chicago blues. The band formed in 1994, and the origin story matters: McCready and Saunders had met in rehab in Minnesota, at Hazelden. They came back to Seattle, brought in Martin, and then McCready called Staley. The music they made together carries the weight of that context without ever announcing it.
Bad Animals Studio, where the album was recorded and mixed, was co-owned by Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart. Producer Brett Eliason, who had worked as Pearl Jam’s sound engineer, co-produced the record alongside the band. The combination of a familiar engineer and a studio with good bones probably helped. When you have seven days, you need a room that works on the first day.
The lead single, “River of Deceit,” reached number two on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and remains the song most people reach for first. It earns that position. The guitar line is patient, almost reluctant, and Staley’s vocal sits just above it without pressing. Two other singles followed: “I Don’t Know Anything,” which reached number 20 on the same chart, and “Long Gone Day.” Both tracks had been previewed publicly before the album came out, appearing on Pearl Jam’s Self-Pollution satellite radio broadcast on January 8, 1995, alongside “Lifeless Dead.” That pirate broadcast, a four-and-a-half-hour transmission available to any radio station that wanted to carry it, was an unusual way to introduce a new band, and it suited Mad Season’s sideways relationship with the music industry just fine.
Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees contributed guest vocals on two tracks, “I’m Above” and “Long Gone Day,” and is also credited as a co-writer on both. Saxophonist Skerik played on “Long Gone Day” as well, giving the song a texture that sits slightly outside what you’d expect from a mid-nineties Seattle record. Lanegan’s voice on those tracks adds a different kind of gravity, lower and more weathered than Staley’s, and the contrast between the two singers is one of the album’s quieter pleasures.
Above was released on March 14, 1995, through Columbia Records. It peaked at number 24 on the Billboard 200 and was certified gold by the RIAA. Those are solid numbers for a side project that rehearsed twice before recording. The album runs 55 minutes across ten tracks, and the pacing is deliberate throughout. Nothing rushes. “Wake Up” closes the record at nearly eight minutes, and it earns the length.
What makes “Above” worth returning to, thirty years on, is the quality of the restraint. McCready is a guitarist who can fill a room, but on this record he mostly chooses not to. The songs breathe. Staley, who wrote all the lyrics, sounds present in a way that his Alice in Chains work sometimes obscured behind the band’s denser arrangements. The album was his only project where he had full lyrical control, and you can hear him using it.
The biographical shadow over “Above” is unavoidable now. John Baker Saunders died of a heroin overdose on January 15, 1999. Layne Staley died of a drug overdose in April 2002. McCready has said he hoped the band would be a way for its members to work through their struggles. The music didn’t save anyone, but it preserved something: a specific moment when four people walked into a studio in Seattle, figured out what they were doing in about a week, and made a record that still holds its shape.
