On an appropriately rainy September morning back in 2012, I sat down to breakfast with Chris Cornell at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
We were there to talk about King Animal — the first new Soundgarden album in 15 years — for a cover story that I was writing for Revolver magazine. I'd written about Soundgarden and other Cornell-related projects many times over the previous two decades, but this was the first time I'd ever interviewed him (in person or otherwise), and I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. I'd chatted several times in the past with Kim Thayil, and always found the Soundgarden guitarist to be gregarious and hysterically funny; but there always seemed to be a sense of "otherness" emanating from Cornell, both onstage and in interviews, which made me wonder what (if anything) was really going on behind his striking visage...
I should probably get this out of the way right here: While I'd followed Soundgarden's career since the release of their Screaming Life EP in 1987, and I saw them live nearly a dozen times between 1989 and their 1997 breakup, I was never a huge Soundgarden fan. I respected what they did, admired their individual and collective talents, related (of course) to their 70s rock influences — yet their music never really resonated with me the way that, say, the music of their Pacific Northwest compatriots Screaming Trees and Mudhoney did. Even today, if you were to ask me what my favorite Soundgarden LP is, I honestly couldn't tell you. They're all impressive — and impressively consistent — in their own way, but I can't say I'm ever "in the mood" for some Soundgarden. Such are the vagaries of musical tastebuds...
That said, I was still incredibly saddened by his unnecessarily premature passing, and my heart hurts not just for his family and all the people out there who knew and loved him, but for all my friends (and I have many) who were legitimately huge fans of his music — Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog, Audioslave, and/or his solo work. And it's for that latter group that I'm re-posting this full transcript of our interview, most of which (for reasons of space) didn't make it into my Revolver piece. During our conversation, I felt like I really got a glimpse of the kid inside the man, the diehard music fan inside the rock god, the humor and intelligence churning away behind the quiet reserve that was (probably) equal parts natural shyness and necessary self-protection. I genuinely enjoyed our conversation that morning; and if you were a Chris Cornell fan, I believe you'll probably dig reading this. Rest in Peace, Chris.
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Chris Cornell: Hey, before we start — have you heard the whole record?
Me: Oh yeah; I've had a stream of the whole thing for about a week now.
Okay, good. It’s kind of typical for a Soundgarden record — if you hear any of the songs taken out of context, it’s fine, but you don’t get the whole picture.
There's been a lot of expectant buzz about the album on the internet. Do you ever go on Soundgarden chat boards or anything like that, and read what your fans are saying?
I’ve never done that, ever. Things get to me — like, I might hear about something that a fan has said — but most of the time I’m ignorant of it, and kind of want to be. I don’t see it being helpful. And personally, I’ve never been the person that would go online and comment on a message board or posted video, or anything like that. I don’t want to judge people that do it; if that’s something you’re into, I get it. But it seems to me that those venues are mostly for people kind of picking things apart. It’s more about people interacting with each other than the art that someone else is doing. It might be people who are passionate about being fans, but what they’re doing is participating and communicating with each other in some way; it’s a social thing. And that has nothing to do with — and it should have nothing to do with — Soundgarden writing and recording. [Laughs] So I ignore it. Even if someone sends a message, saying, “People are very upset about X,” I immediately try to dismiss it, and hope that I’m not so stupid that I would do something that would upset fans… But you know, fifty percent of my career is doing things that upset a certain group of fans. [Laughs] So I don’t want to neglect that side, either — I’m working on the next thing that’s gonna really piss people off!
The album has a very dramatic flow to it. How involved were you in the sequencing of the album?
This was the first Soundgarden record, because it’s been 15 years, that I could just put the final mixes — or whatever was closest to the final mixes — in an iTunes playlist and just move them around. I probably spent the most time sequencing it that I have on any record. There were some songs, and this is always the problem with Soundgarden, where if you take them out of context and play them side-by-side, it sounds like we’re insane people for trying to put them on the same record. But once you sequence it correctly, it all makes sense. We have a lot of different influences, and we’re pretty liberal about collecting them and putting them all together in one song. And also, all four of us are coming from different angles on each song, because we all hear it our own way, and we all relate to it — cognitively, at any rate — based on what we imagine the influences are. We might do a song, for example, that Ben brings in, and I hear a completely different influence than him or Matt might hear in the same song. So it becomes kind of a collective thing. It takes a little bit of finesse to sequence from beginning to end and have it make sense.
Give me an example of two songs on the album that seem weird together when you remove them from the running order...
Well, on this album, one of the last songs we finished was “Blood On the Valley Floor”. Everybody was super happy with it, but that really pushed the needle a little bit towards super slow, aggressive, riff-oriented Soundgarden. And then there’s the song “Halfway There,” which is almost Beatle-y. And how do those two songs live on the same album without us sounding like insane people? [Laughs] To get all of that through is a little bit of a challenge. But what you get out of it at the other end, I think, is an authentic album experience, [something] I was raised with, and people don’t necessarily, at least in large numbers, give a shit about anymore. But hopefully this album will help.
Was the "authentic album experience" a big part of how you absorbed music as a kid?
Yeah. I did a lot of listening to music alone — that’s sort of how I became a musician, just based on years and years of being a super-geeky music fan. I didn’t really think of being in a band or making records or writing songs until I was probably 17, 18… it didn’t start at 10. I wrote songs and stuff, but I didn’t think that was what I was going to do until I was in my late teens. Listening to an album was definitely like a really important escapist thing that I completely dove into. And that was my only perspective ever while we were making albums, is that it would be that...
Once Soundgarden became a live touring band, then sometimes I would steer into the notion of a live experience when I was writing a song: “What are we missing that we don’t deliver live? Let’s write that!” But the priority was always that it would be an album experience, and that you’d draw your listener into a world that they can only go into through you, and then get lost in that without any missteps by us that would shock the listener out of that and back to reality — like that clunky acting scene in a movie where you’re really into it, and then you see behind the curtain and realize you're in a theater seat with a bunch of people next to you.
It’s a great headphones record, as well. It's very immersive — it sucks you in and never lets you come up for air.
That’s the goal, I think. We don’t go after that from song one; it’s something that kind of naturally happens, but which we also sort of manipulate as we’re reaching the end, when we’re sequencing, mixing and mastering. The artwork also is important, [even though] probably only a fraction of people even look at it any more. To me, that was another triumph for this album — seeing the cover art and the back cover with the song titles on it, seeing the album title work together with the songs, and the whole thing becoming what I would imagine a Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd album was to me, at least as a kid. I used to buy records at this head shop that was near my house. They would always burn incense in there, so all my albums smelled like that incense, so that was part of the whole trip, too! [Laughs]
Where did the title King Animal come from?
That came from Kim. I was assuming that it came from just sitting with the album art; this is the first time that I can remember where the album art was done before the album was done or before a title came, so the title itself wasn’t really influencing the visual. So Matt and Kim and Ben were all kind of throwing ideas around for titles; I was badgering Kim to come up with something brilliant, like he’s done before. He’s the one who blurted out “Badmotorfinger!” and “Ultramega OK!” — just stream of consciousness. A couple of the ideas we were thinking about didn’t really fit with the artwork, and I think Kim just dreamed that up viewing Josh Graham’s artwork, thinking of how it fit in with the artwork and the song titles and the big picture. And it really drew it all together.
It's like King of the Jungle returning to reinforce its dominance. Is that how you see Soundgarden right now?
Yeah, it’s confident, not passive. And it does that one magical thing which Badmotorfinger and Superunknown and Louder Than Love did, which is, it’s a memorable and strong title to a body of work that you can’t really title with a description. We’ve never been able to do that; that’s why our titles have always been somewhat ambiguous. We can’t really lay out a title that describes the music within in one line, or the band itself in one line, like AC/DC did over and over with High Voltage, Powerage, and on and on.
Louder Than Love always struck me as doing exactly that, though.
It might be closer. Screaming Life was, also… though it was also more brief.
As I understand it, you guys reunited, initially at least, more out of a curatorial impulse than a creative one.
Yeah. It had taken a little time. A couple years after we disbanded, it became sort of clear that our musical legacy had moved into this sort of classic rock embodiment, which was great — that was another triumph to me, like, Okay, our music is going to go on. It’s not dated, it wasn’t "of the moment," it wasn’t listened to because it was part of a genre, it wasn’t because of geography anymore. It was based on the songs. But then, as time went on, it also slowly but surely became clear to all of us that new generations of fans are being born and growing up — and as I did, they’re going to gravitate towards essentially what’s in front of their face. Some of the records that changed my life, I picked up literally by accident; someone left it at my house, or I liked the cover, that sort of thing.
Like what, for example?
Well, like the first Bauhaus record I bought was a live record [Press the Eject and Give Me the Tape]. Peter Murphy’s hiding his face behind a cymbal — which is removed from the drum kit, which I liked — and he’s singing. Something about that just spoke to me, like, “I don’t know what this is, but this has to be great.” I took it home and listened to it once, and I didn’t really like it, and it sat in my record collection. And then I was going through my albums and saw it again, and I was like, “This has to be good — I must have been in a shitty mood when I listened to it.” I put it back on, and they became one of my favorite bands, and I started having friends who were Bauhaus fans; I suddenly had goth friends, and stuff.
So basically, you wanted Soundgarden's music to be discoverable for kids who would have been born to late to know about the band during its actual existence.
Yeah, it became sort of obvious that we need to do that, because no one else was doing it. Management wasn’t doing it. The label, which has a huge part of our history in their catalog, was doing nothing. We didn’t have a fan club anymore, we didn’t have a website; we had nothing. So that’s what started it. And we were super proud of every part of it; there’s no ‘dark period’ where we were bummed out about what happened. The last creative experience we had, Down on the Upside, was a great one, so we didn’t really have to get over that hump of, “Making those last three records was so awful, I don’t know if I can do it again.” [Laughs] We didn’t have that.
At what point did you decide that making new music was going to be part of the plan?
I don’t know. We were sitting in a room together, all four of us for probably the first time in 14 years, and the first five minutes were a little awkward. I guess it’s just human nature. Everyone’s a little guarded and a little cautious, and everybody looks a little different. But after five minutes, we’re remembering when the roadie was lighting his farts, and when someone was in a blackout and swinging from a chandelier, or whatever — just all the funny stories. And that went on for like an hour and a half. And to me, once that was going on, it felt like… you just become a band. That’s all you know how to be together, anyway, because that’s all you ever were. Everyone that’s in the band now, I was friends with before we were a band. But probably some of our most intense life experiences, individually, happened when all four of us were there. So that immediately is resurrected, it just is. So I felt from that moment, whatever it is that everybody wants to do, it has to be unanimous — we would never individually participate in something that was “Soundgarden” if it wasn’t us four.
How soon did you go from that meeting to actually making music together?
It took a little time. We immediately had things to do — putting together the Telephantasm compilation, discovering that we had live recordings we didn’t know about and putting that together, getting the website going, getting the fan club going again, and then rehearsing to play a show. In that first year, we had so many show offers that we turned down, it was kind of ridiculous. It was like, all over the world, all at the same time, insane money — and we all immediately and unanimously said “no” to that. And to me, that seemed to be when suddenly everyone felt comfortable moving forward. Because I think that what caused us to split apart, rather than just take a hiatus, was just that Soundgarden had become a business; and that business had somehow, in a sense, started to be able to dictate to us what, where and how we were going to do things, whether we were into it or comfortable with it or not. I think once we all realized that’s going to happen now — we’d just turned down a year of touring, so obviously nobody’s into it for that reason, nobody’s into it because they need a check, nobody’s into it because it’s a "smart business decision" — I think that just made everybody comfortable. And the actual creative process was natural; everybody had ideas right away. The only obstacle was getting all four of us in a room together.
Synching up the schedules?
Yeah. But I actually liked how that rolled out, in a lot of ways. Because I think there are a few moments, as in the making of any record, where you sort of lose perspective — and I’ll get that perspective back six months after that record comes out. [Laughs] That didn’t happen on King Animal, because we had that little extra time to gain perspective. The downside to that can be, and it can happen to anybody, that if you sit with songs, mixes, arrangements for too long, you can completely fall into a downward spiral and overthink everything; it’s not fresh and exciting anymore, and you forgot what you liked about the song. I was worried about that a few times, just thinking ahead like, “Well, what if this happens?” But it didn’t happen.
Billy Corgan dissed you guys recently, saying that your reunion was clearly all about the money — but from what you're telling me, that doesn't seem to be the case at all.
No. And even if it were, wouldn’t that be the pot calling the kettle black? Last time I saw him, he was starting a new Smashing Pumpkins record with one other founding member, that was it. I would even sort of defend a band that did get back together to support their legacy and tour and make money. If you actually are fortunate enough to have created a legacy, what then? [Laughs] What is the appropriate thing to do? What is the honorable thing to do? Set it aside? It’s yours — you can do anything you want with it, and that’s your business. I think that the only dishonorable way to handle it is one that will hurt the individual. Selling off your rights to administer it, for example — that would be doing a bad thing to your legacy for the money. And people have done that; their songs end up in commercials. Sly Stone lives in a van; he sold his publishing for 50 grand. That’s really sad.
Sonically and musically, you guys clearly haven’t lost sight of what made Soundgarden Soundgarden. Or maybe that’s just what happens when the four of you guys get together in the studio?
Well, there’s growth; I hear it in a lot of things, and I also saw it in a lot of ways, where it felt to me like everybody had an easier time getting what they wanted in the studio. Any sort of obstacles that we used to have, all of that showed up in the same way. There’s definitely that sort of alchemy and chemistry where when the four of us play together; no matter what it is, it sounds like Soundgarden. So that was there. But part of it too is this unmanageable, chaotic thing that I’d forgotten about...
I used to think about it a lot, because we would have these shows — even on our last tour of Australia [before the band broke up], we were having some of the best shows of our career, and some of the worst! And I was trying to figure out why, and it kind of came down to this indescribable chaotic element that’s there, and if there’s too much of it, it’s a disaster, and if there’s none of it, it’s a disaster. There has to be a certain amount of it, but it doesn’t seem to be controllable, which is scary. So what do you do? Do you just go out there and hope that that element is there in an adequate amount to make it great? [Laughs] That came right back, and I had not heard that since we split up, and I’d never had that experience with any other people.
That's pretty amazing.
It really was. And then the other thing that was there, and what was evident immediately when we started writing together again, was that we still had vision in the same amount that we always did. Soundgarden always had vision; I guess you’d call it a “collective vision,” because everyone individually had their own vision of what Soundgarden meant, to them and to our fans. We’ve always had that, through thick and thin, because there were periods where people were quite critical of us — critics, the indie scene. The indie scene was always critical of me, from the very beginning, because it was back when the word "alternative" was based on its actual definition, and the biggest selling commercial music of the time was hard rock. I think it appeared to a lot of people that I could have existed in that world, so why am I bothering the post-punk indie people with my presence, if I can actually sing and come up with melodies? It was like, "Go be in a big, famous arena rock band!" [Laughs] So we had all of those [people criticizing us]… and throughout that, we all stuck to the vision, and I suppose that’s sometimes what gets lost in the perpetuation of a band over a long period of time. Do you remember when Chrome just kinda became Damon Edge?
You mean, after he split with Helios Creed and then started making his own records as Chrome?
Yeah. It was still cool, but it was not Chrome — the vision was gone, and it had become something else. And I think that that can happen. But we haven’t lost it, even a little bit. Everyone’s head is still in the game the same way. Whatever problems we had before, personally, with just functioning as human beings, we probably all still have. Just maybe over the course of a few years, we’ve come to understand how to deal with those things a little better, but they’re all still there. Nobody showed up with a Deepak Chopra book in their backpack, you know? [Laughs] Nobody has completely transformed into another human being. And I’m thankful for that, in a weird way.
Are songs ever rejected for not sounding Soundgarden-y enough?
I think that shows up every once in awhile, but almost never has that kept it from being a song that gets recorded — and if it gets recorded and mixed, it usually ends up being on the record. I think no matter what it is, even if it’s a demo where you hear it and think, “That’s not Soundgarden-y enough,” it becomes Soundgarden once everyone plays on it, pretty much every time. I think “Black Hole Sun” was a big outside moment — everyone liked the song, but none of us, including me, were sure that that should be on a Soundgarden album. And then we just recorded it, and it seemed to fit really well within the context of the rest of the album. But none of us ever thought it would be a single; that didn’t make any sense. I’ve always felt that I never really cared what the singles are; whatever it is, it’s fine with me. If it’s on the album, I like it! [Laughs]
There's always been a weirder aspect to Soundgarden’s music — whether it was your prog-rock time signatures or your psychedelic moments — though it's something you haven't always gotten credit for. And that comes through on the new album, as well.
Yeah, it definitely does. I felt like there was an early period, too — and we were loved and hated for it in the indie world — which was bringing in elements of 70s rock. The punk-rock Bible group hadn’t really accepted that notion yet. [Laughs] It was like, “No, wait a minute, you can’t do that!” I remember Soundgarden playing an early gig in Vancouver, and Mike Bordin of Faith No More was there; he was a big early supporter. And I remember an ashtray, a big chunky glass ashtray, whizzing right past my temple. The audience was all completely back against the wall and seated. They just hated us. At that moment, I felt like, “Oh... we know something that they don’t!” It was that confidence that came from getting that reaction, which we got a few more times. And every time we got that reaction, I felt like, “We’re doing something that they don’t know what to do with.” It’s not that it’s bad, because that’s not how people react to bad — it’s something else. You’re talking to your buddy if it’s a bad band playing; you’re ordering another drink and ignoring it. You’re not standing there looking at it, trying to figure out if you should kill them or like them.
But even once people accepted you for being heavy, it was almost like they chose to ignore your more proggy or psychedelic aspects.
I think we’ve always been a little too diverse to figure out easily. And that can be a problem, possibly now more than ever, because people digest things very quickly and then are distracted by the next thing. I think it’s helped our longevity, and I think it will help our longevity after we drop dead; but I also think it was a minus when it came to popularity in the big picture, and selling a lot of records, and existing in the major label world that way. We still have the elements of indie post-punk that was kind of anchoring us, and keeping us from being an easily understandable and accessible commercial rock band. Which we never were. We had our moments, but we were also very difficult, if not impossible, to mimic with any success. [Laughs] I’ve had people send me songs [of other bands] for years, saying, “These guys are totally copping your band, bro!” I’ll hear a couple lines in the song where there will be an element of something that I do, but that’s it. Or it’ll be a big riff and a guy with a huge range, but it sounds like a heavy metal singer. I always felt like we did too many things to have a soundalike band exist, and that’s probably another indication of why we haven’t sold 40 million records, either. People have to be able to understand it easily for you to have that kind of success.
I’ve always summed all that up as good for us. Like, how lucky are we that we can sort of maintain that? Some of the weirdness and versatility, which is super exciting when it’s your band and that’s what you get to do. And yet, to still have enough success that we can continue to make records as long as we want, and we can all have careers separately, and we can all go out on the street or go to a hockey game and not get harassed. And that’s pretty awesome! I think it’s good for us to sort of pause occasionally and realize how lucky we are to have that balance that we created. Even though it seemed like it took us a long time to gain an audience, there was never a moment where it was like, EVERYTHING CHANGED OVERNIGHT, like every single “Behind the Music”. All those Behind the Musics, they're all pretty close to the same story: “Yeah, we met in high school or the first year of college, we started a band, somebody’s friend was an agent who brought in a manager, we made a record, it sold 60 million records in a week, and then we had trouble making the second record because everyone was super-high and we hated each other.” [Laughs] That wasn’t us; we didn’t have that. We chugged away and chugged away and chugged away, and we kind of still do.
Okay, I have to admit this: I remember seeing you guys with Mudhoney and Bullet Lavolta at Cabaret Metro in Chicago in the fall of 1989. The other bands pulled up in vans, and I remember my friends and I were totally ragging on the fact that you guys had a tour bus — like, "Oooh, look at the big rock stars!" Of course, we had no concept at the time of how utterly unglamorous life in a tour bus actually is; plus, in retrospect, that was probably a pretty old and crappy one, right?
[Laughs] Oh yeah, and we rode those dirty old buses all around the world for a long time. At the same time, we weren’t thinking about it, because we were living our life. I think the biggest mistake a band can make, or anybody that’s an artist I suppose, is to ever imagine a finish line. Like, “Once we sell this amount of records, we’ll be cool.” You’ve always gotta be sort of dissatisfied, no matter what it is, otherwise you’re not gonna keep moving on. I can’t remember which of the many Bob Dylan documentaries this came from, but there’s that quote from him about how an artist should never find themselves, they always should be looking, and then they’ll be all right. I’ve always felt that about us, that we’ve never made a defining record.
Really? I know a lot of people who would beg to differ on that.
I think Badmotorfinger in a sense is kind of defining, in that we sort of figured out on that album how to max out what we thought we had been about for the last few years. But then we kind of immediately and easily reinvented that on Superunknown. There was never a moment where we felt like, “This is who we are, and we’ve just done the best version of this that we can do. Now what?” Because it’s always evolving. And I don’t know where that comes from. It could be because you’ve got four members involved in earnest in writing songs, so you have these four different impressions of what Soundgarden should sound like. So it’s always moving. But I feel like we’re still searching...
The last song I finished writing lyrics and singing to [for this album] was “Blood on the Valley Floor." It was funny, because it was the last one, and I felt that that one was, somehow, a triumph — and without ever discussing it or worrying about it, it was like we’d sort of solved a puzzle that had been around for years. We made this slow and heavy song sound only like us, and nobody else. And maybe we’ve done that before, but in my mind I felt like we were always reaching for some version of that sound, and we’d always somehow missed it — whether it was the arrangement, or the way that I sang it, or it was too long, or I tried to put some other element in it that didn’t fit. That’s like a moment I think of defining one of the million ideas that Soundgarden represents to me, like, “Oh, I’ve reached out and actually achieved that, and I don’t have to think about anymore.” Now we’ve got all these other issues, where I’m still dissatisfied with this aspect or that aspect. And then somebody will bring in a song that has nothing to do with any of these ideas, and then suddenly you have this new parameter in considering what the band means. Now it’s a new band! Whoa!
