In late April, Chris Cornell was in Seattle for a sold-out show at Showbox SoDo. Just a few hours before his set, the former Soundgarden frontman and recent Timbaland collaborator spent some time with Sound in his swanky Four Seasons suite. Much of the surprisingly long conversation can be found in this month’s cover story on the former grunge god, Key Change. Here is more of it, the second in a three-part bonus Q&A with Cornell.
SOUND: Have you found your true musical self with Scream?
CC: One thing I can say with all confidence is that I’m not really searching for the real me musically. A good example of that is with Soundgarden. We sort of defined who we were with the album Badmotorfinger. It took us a while to get there; it took three years to be in a situation to even release anything. We made Badmotorfinger, and I think we really defined the band at that moment, who we were at that time. And where do you go from there? The next record, we were really restless. We really had to reinvent ourselves. It didn’t necessarily make sense to fans in the bigger picture, because Badmotorfinger was the first album that had big success outside the indie world. And all of a sudden, Superunknown comes out and it’s completely different. But we had to do it. We had to go and do something else, because we’d defined that version of who we were, and had to create a new identity. I think we did that really successfully, and continued to do it on Down on the Upside. Those were the really prolific years, in terms of us writing songs and being who we were. Very adventurous.
That’s a good example of me personally not wanting to define myself and my identity as a musician. I think that’s the world left for people who die. [Laughs] I heard a Nick Drake song on a movie the other night, and I missed listening to his music. I’d listened a lot for a couple of years, but stopped. It’s suspended in time. I look at him as doing this one magical thing. Period. For someone who lives beyond three albums and has a life span, that’s a different story. You know, I want to be forever searching. I want to forever, in a sense, play a new game every time I play.
SOUND: In that way, Scream isn’t a surprise at all.
CC: You’re one of the few people who recognize that. Even when Soundgarden wasn’t releasing records yet, when we were getting songs we recorded in my living room played on KCMU, I was writing weird sort of solo music. And Matt Cameron was doing the same thing, writing and recording on his own. Ben always did that. Hiro did that. We always kind of did that.
Temple of the Dog is a great example—I had a group of songs that were very different than Soundgarden. I didn’t think they fit with my image of what the band was. The song “Seasons” that was on the Singles soundtrack—that could have been on a Soundgarden record later. It could have maybe been on Superunknown, sure. At the time, it didn’t really make sense. It didn’t make sense for Louder Than Love or Badmotorfinger—it would have sounded like somebody’s solo song on the middle of band’s album.
And then Euphoria Morning—a lot of that came from the fact that songs, particularly singles like “Outshined,” “Bird in My Hand,” “Rusty Cage,” “Black Hole Sun”—I wrote those songs in their entirety. So I wanted to move forward as a solo artist and not be echoing Soundgarden. Because Soundgarden is very important to me as a band and artistically as an entity, as its own beast. So I steered away from anything that would be like that.
[For Audioslave], I wrote a couple of songs in their entirety, but they were very different. I would write [parts]; in “Like a Stone,” I wrote the bridge section, because it was something they weren’t really used to doing. It was kind of coming from sort of a Beatles angle. I love that type of Beatles refrain in a song—it pulls the rug out from under it, then reintroduces the song as though it’s the first time you’ve heard it.
SOUND: And many fans have stuck with you through it all.
CC: I have a fractured fan base. I see it in the audience. One of the cool things that I’ve noticed—I’ll see the bigger, roudier, bearded guys that you expect to go berserk for “Rusty Cage” or “Outshined,” and I’ll hit a song like “Enemy” or “Watch Out” or “Scream” from the new album, and they go berserk. That’s a really satisfying moment. Even if it’s a group of four or five people, I’m having an impact on them as music fans that’s pretty broad, pretty extensive. It’s very satisfying. I don’t know how else to put it.
SOUND: There’s a line in “Sweet Revenge”: “Let me talk to the fans.” What do you want to tell them, and what’s the revenge?
CC: There’s a lot of things. At that time, and a lot of previous times in my life, the craziness of the music business separates you from the fans. I remember Mike Bordin, the drummer of Faith No More, referring to the music business as “the poison” that you have to kind of deal with to be able to do what you love to do. Which is to be a musician and write songs and play music and have this experience with your fans. That always stuck with me. And to this day, it’s something that’s very distracting. I don’t want to sound like an idiot, like a naive person saying, “I should be able to make albums and reach the world with my music without ever having to talk to a person who wears a tie!” I wish I could do that! But at the same time, there are times when it is too much being surrounded by business people.
One thing I think that’s really cool about what hip hop could bring to rock music is the entrepreneurship of it. There’s a lot of grassroots happening in hip hop that never happened in rock music, or that happened here and there, but this is coming from a place that’s family-oriented. One guy brings up his buddy, and another guy brings up the next. Everybody has each other’s backs, sort of circling the wagons all the time, trying to protect what they do.
SOUND: Would you say that happened in the late 80s here?
CC: Definitely. And to varying degrees of success. Soundgarden was very successful at autonomy. We set a tone that was so impenetrable that I still benefit from it today. I have yet to have a record company person come into a recording studio when I’m doing what I do. Ever. I believe the reason that is is because the tone was set in 1989, 1990, when we were saying, “We don’t want to sign with a major label under any conditions other than we do whatever we want and we deliver you the records.”
I remember talking to Krist Novoselic about In Utero, and seeing an interview with Steve Albini about how DGC was refusing to release it. I remember thinking, how is it that a band that just sold 14 million records worldwide can get shut down by a record company? I don’t think they can. I think if they just said, “We’re not gonna change this,” [DGC] would have put it out. Because it’s just bad business otherwise. I think there was sometimes undo pressure put on Kurt. I think that is certainly part of the equation of what his thinking was, what led to his demise. Undue pressure coming from “the poison.”
SOUND: So the revenge is, “Hey, I’m going to do this my way”?
CC: Exactly. And I always will. That’s made even easier for me, anyway, by what I believe is the musical revolution of this generation. It’s not a band or a sound or a genre, it’s the internet and the technology we can use to record [music], the way we can share our music and the way we can work. I’m writing songs with a friend of mine now, and when I’m on the road I have like a backpack that has a mobile recording studio in it. I didn’t like some vocal takes I did when I was at home, so I redid them in the hotel room and file-shared them. Now they’re in the song. [Laughs] Purists may frown on that, but for me, I’m a kid in a candy store. We can share music now in seconds. It used to take a room filled with equipment, a reel-to-reel, a whole bunch of outboard gear to record it. You’d record a song on that and mix it down onto cassette, which you could then go play for your buddy in his car. Now—a song that I cowrote with my friend Rory de la Rosa—he sent me lyrics, I wrote the music and recorded it in my little home studio. I uploaded it so people could download it, and never left the room.
SOUND: What’s it like to be in a position to do that for a fan?
CC: I don’t know how possible it is to comprehend it. He’s sort of still in the stages I was in maybe the first time I heard a Soundgarden song on the radio. Because some stations are playing the song [song name], and he wrote the lyrics entirely. It’s being sung by his musical hero, and I have no reference for that. David Gilmour didn’t write a song from my lyrics and rock it… [Laughs] It goes into different emotional layers. It opens up a topic, too, about what makes an important album or an important song? I always get into that with anybody who works in the music business or adopts the attitude that commercial success equals quality. Or that critical success equals actual quality.
One of the first things I remember Rory telling me was that his daughter, who died of cancer, her favorite song was “Killing Birds,” from Carry On. Just to hear that made me feel that even if no one else had ever hear that song, it was more than worth it. It’s incomprehensible, difficult to understand the depth of it. I try to stay a little bit out of that, so when I pick up a guitar to write a song, I’m not thinking about what kind of impact it can have. I’m just thinking about being what I’m supposed to be, which is a self-involved, self-important songwriter.
SOUND: What you’re supposed to be.
CC: Exactly. [Laughs] I’m supposed to be the narcissistic, self-important songwriter. A dreamer, pulling things out of the clouds, writing about myself as if anyone should ever give a shit.