There’s an image I always had of, like, the Ramones and AC/DC - two bands I got into sort of simultaneously. You guys are in a unique position now - on the one hand, over the years anything you’ve done aside from the band seems to have been viewed in the shadow of, “Well, it’s not Soundgarden.” On the other, while in Soundgarden you were allowed to be experimental and still achieve mainstream success. There’s a strong enthusiasm about all of it. It feels very much like any Soundgarden album in terms of the vitality of it, and then maybe just a little bit more of a refreshing feeling ‘cause we haven’t done it in a long time. That part of it makes it really rewarding to work on a new album, just because there’s newness all the time, and everyone’s a songwriter in the band everyone brings music to the table and pretty elaborate ideas, and though everyone has their own sensibilities everyone’s always growing. Soundgarden was always really good at that if anything I think our Achilles heel has been we were too eclectic and allowed ourselves to maybe be too adventurous from one album to another, to a point where we don’t really have a sound or a song or even two or three songs you could put together and define us musically, for any period, really. When you’re in a band, you know what music everyone likes, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and you know where you can push the envelope and where you can push those boundaries. That’s entirely the fact that in the back of my mind, I’m working on music that has to represent the band itself, the version that’s larger than the sum of its parts and then the individuals. I’m kind of almost surprised daily by the similarities in how I approach writing Soundgarden material and how I feel about it … more even how I feel about it, because musically it’s a different mindset for me. It was the right amount of time.ĭo you find you can still approach things the same way you did back then? It feels really like we just took a break and now it’s over it doesn’t even feel like it was as long as it was. Musically it’s a new experience it definitely has its own environment, it doesn’t feel like we’re reliving our past. By the time we were actually making this new record, it’s all sort of new. I suppose the “good old days” part of the show started a couple years back when we were just hanging out, and that was nostalgic just in the way that you can’t help but get in the room with three other people you have that kind of history with and not start talking about different moments you remember from different parts of our career together that were funny or not funny or whatever, and you reminisce. What’s the mood in the studio like for your guys right now? Nostalgic for the good old days, or are you just looking forward at this point? Chris Cornell! Vulture Transcript! Let’s go! But that doesn’t mean, as he recently told Vulture in a free-flowing conversation - now presented largely unedited - that he’s any less excellently heavy and gloomy. Cornell’s now a happily married dad and psyched to be back with the band, playing shows, and taking the time they need in the recording studio. It was over a year ago that Cornell tweeted “School is back in session knights of the Soundtable ride again!” and, since then, the band - one-third of the holy grunge trinity completed by Nirvana and Pearl Jam - have reunited, and are working on a new record and touring for the first time in twenty years (they play New York’s Jones Beach this Saturday). But he’s now come full-circle, and with his now-iconic gritty voice intact. In the past twenty years, Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell has passed through pretty much all the stations of the cross that a worshipped lead singer of a seminal nineties rock band can: utter adulation (Soundgarden and Temple of the Dog) mixed feelings (the solo records) confusion (those Audioslave lyrics) and incredulous hatred (the Timbaland record).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |