Audioslave was something that I felt had become a career decision. It became three albums over a period of years touring with a specific group of people.
— Chris Cornell
When you have four guys in a room writing songs, it different. It's great - that's what makes a band a band. Audioslave was great.
When I did the solo acoustic tour in 2010, I fell in love with that kind of performance.
There's sadness to anyone that dies before their time, and specifically ones that seem to affect people in a positive way. It doesn't matter if it's Whitney Houston or a nameless, faceless person on the street. That's just as big of a tragedy for me.
Whenever anyone sends me a link to a band, saying, 'These guys sound exactly like Soundgarden,' it's always some super simple sludge riff with a singer that sings high and screechy. And it's really awful.
I remember hearing songs from the Mother Love Bone album, and hearing Alice in Chains, and feeling like this is more than just a fad or moment.
No matter what, I can't sound like John Lennon. But I can do Tom Jones.
The fans own the records and listen to them and love them. It becomes the soundtrack to some part of their lives, and we don't control that. To me, that's what's exciting about what we do.
I would look at older blues musicians who just keep going into their seventies. They keep doing it until they drop dead. And I've always felt like that's what I want to do. I've felt that since the day I was able to start playing music for a living. I don't see the point of thinking about retiring because it's not work to begin with.
Seattle very much benefited from this geography where it was a town nobody had really heard of in terms of a music scene. So we had that factor of being a new discovery.
It just doesn't get any more stripped down than going out totally alone and doing songs.
I wasn't good in school. I didn't do sports. I sat in the bedroom and listened to records. Because the Beatles did whatever they wanted to, I took that as a kid and said, 'That's what rock is.'
When you become a parent, you leave a lot of things behind and refocus, maybe on how simple life really is and what few things there really are to worry about. And everything else can go by the wayside.
When you're out on the road touring and touring and then making records, you're just constantly looking forward, constantly working. You don't really stop to look at where you are or where you've been.
It's about trying to step out of being patterned and closed off and reclusive, which I've always had a problem with. It's about attempting to be normal and just go out and be around other people and hang out. I have a tendency to sometimes be pretty closed off and not see people for long periods of time and not call anyone.
One of the main dilemmas that's pretty common to a lot of people who are getting older is the idea that maybe there's a finish line and that maybe there's a time in your life when you start to slow down and stop and smell the roses and just kind of settle into what will be a comfortable period in your life.
I think back to my childhood, and I remember running around as a kid. We were all running around then. It wasn't about getting into shape. It's just what we did.
A band that makes records and tours is also a business. That's usually where a lot of disagreements come. It's four guys who are musicians and don't really know much about business, but are very passionate and have very specific ideas.
When you break out the acoustic guitar, the words are the focal point unless you're the Jimi Hendrix of the acoustic guitar. So the words have to have meaning.
When I started writing songs for Temple of the Dog, I went to my room with my acoustic guitar, and I was happy staying in that mode. It was more chordal based and more lyric driven. I enjoyed not making riff-based songs built around a guitar idea.
The first time I ever went to Hawaii, I was listening to island music, thinking, 'I could've been born here, and I'm pretty sure I would never play that.'
Being solo really lends itself to different interpretations - and everything is in the moment and on a whim. I never realised how far out you can go when you are by yourself.
Soundgarden signing to a major, then Mother Love Bone, and seeing the same happen to Alice in Chains. We were all suddenly making music and recording at the same time, and we had money to do it. It wasn't like a $2,000 recording that you do over a weekend. It's like, 'Wow, maybe this will be our job.'
When I was eight, my piano teacher played seven or eight notes, and I sang them. She stopped and looked at me in shock! That was the first time I'd gotten that reaction. I'd had looks of horror, but never shock in a positive way.
You sometimes get the feeling that people think getting back together after a hiatus to write and record a record is work, you know, arduous and unpleasant. Being able to write and record - that's a privilege. I don't forget the long days I spent working in a restaurant, when I wanted to be done so I could go home and work on a song.
Hip-hop kind of absorbed rock in terms of the attitude and the whole point of why rock was important music. Young people felt like rock music was theirs, from Elvis to the Beatles to the Ramones to Nirvana. This was theirs; it wasn't their parents'. I think hip-hop became the musical style that embraces that mentality.
I've always felt like there's a certain amount of doing what I do, and performing and making records and doing interviews and photo shoots and that, that are kind of a necessary evil of getting my music to people's ears to hear. Over the years, I've just become more tolerant of that.
There was a period in my life where most of my musical career was spent in a band that was very aggressive, and there was sort of a wall of volume all the time.
One thing that I have thought ever since Temple of the Dog is that I would never say no to an interesting collaboration, and that's partly where Audioslave came from.
Soundgarden was incredibly democratic, and I was really proud of that. I felt like we got along better than most bands we toured with and most people we knew. And at the same time, when you're that democratic and concerned with each other's opinions, you're always concerned with what the other people think.
When I met my wife Vicky's family, I had to go out of my way to convince them, to show them, that I wasn't anything like their idea of a musician.
I really had to come to the conclusion, the sort of humbling conclusion that, guess what, I'm no different than anybody else: I've got to sort of ask for help - not something I ever did, ever. And then part two of that is, like, accept it when it comes, and, you know, believe what people tell me.
I came from a childhood where I spent a lot of time alone and a lot of time just living with my imagination, and a certain amount of the adult world was kind of alienating.
I have a hard time narrowing things down to ten or 12 songs. If I walk off stage in anything less than two hours, it just feels strange. It feels early.
Bands work in a way where everyone, at some point, has to have a similar idea of how you do things.
You can't always make out the words I sing with Soundgarden.
There was about two years where I was more or less agoraphobic and didn't deal with anybody, didn't talk to anybody, didn't have any friends at all.
They're a great audience, kids. They actually respond. They don't have the references that adults have, so everything is immediate. It's always interesting to see what they react to in whatever I'm working on at the moment. And they don't even want to discuss why. That's a lesson to remember: My son doesn't care about why.
To me, R&B means Aretha Franklin, who is otherworldly.
I used to hate playing Seattle shows.
There's something about that blind trust between Timbaland and me - two people that have almost nothing in common except for a love of music - that is really rejuvenating.
There was this moment when we made 'Superunknown': the Seattle music scene had suddenly ended up on an international stage with huge success.
I think Freddie Mercury is probably the best of all time in terms of a rock voice. There was a vulnerability to it, his technical ability was amazing, and so much of his personality would come out through his voice. I'm not even a guy to buy Queen records, really, and I still think he's one of the best.
Criticism pretty much follows anything anyone ever does. So, anytime anyone ever writes a song, plays a show, or does whatever they do, there's going to be a certain amount of criticism because that's kind of what happens.
There are a handful of Soundgarden songs that work acoustically, but only a couple. It's not who we were.
You can really walk around a song and completely, if it's a good song, look at it from a lot of different angles. Johnny Cash with Rick Rubin illustrated that perfectly.
If you wanna make money in music, you're better off being on the business end of it a lot of the time. And also as a musician, if you do make money, it means you had to bite and scratch and kick the whole way to not get ripped off, because at every corner, there's somebody there waiting to trip you up and take a bigger chunk.
I've always liked depressing music because a lot of times, listening to it when you're down can actually make you feel less depressed. Also, even though a person may have problems with depression, sometimes you can actually be kind of comfortable in that space because you know how to operate within it.
I think my children are definitely musically inclined, and they show it, and they're exposed to a lot of it. And they're their own people, and I think easily they could do something musical, or they could do something in acting or film or other types of the arts, and I would fully support it.
Obviously, I want my kids to be happy, and I believe that they can be super successful at whatever they want to do, but don't make the successful part more important than the process of doing it. Especially if it's an artistic endeavor.
