I had a dream I was Jerry Cantrell. It was the mid '90s, and Layne Staley and I were writing a song together about hatred for neighbours.

During the writing process, we both realized we had to incorporate a famous Hollywood starlet into the song’s narrative. Charlie Sheen was there, and he suggested an obscure actress from the Golden Age of Hollywood. We decided the actress had to be both young and contemporary, so we didn’t run with his suggestion. We ended up choosing Denise Richards.

I recall the first few lines of that stanza:

Denise Richards lives next door to me

Looking sweet and pretty as can be

I forget the remaining lines. Essentially, the stanza was about the narrator realizing he hated Denise Richards 'cause she was a neighbour, too.

As we were finishing the song, Staley offered this as the closing line: “No singing, just a hum.” There was actually a bit more to the line than that, but at that point, I have run out of fresh pages in the notebook I was writing in, and my OCD wouldn’t allow me to jot the line down on a page with even a minimum of writing on. When I finally did find an unmarred page, I asked Staley to recite the line again, since I had forgotten the extra bits, but he was too far into a heroin-induced delirium to care anymore.