Chris Cornell on New Solo Album, ‘Scream’ Hate and Future of Soundgarden
Chris Cornell was in the middle of a seemingly endless Soundgarden tour in 1989 when he started to burn out on hard rock. “We were on the road just incessantly,” he says. “Every band we toured with was super loud and aggressive with neck tattoos, black sweatshirts, black sweatpants, black sneakers. That’s when I discovered Daniel Johnston’s Songs of Pain. I played it over and over again in the van, and then I got into Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and Nick Drake’s Pink Moon. They were great palate cleansers.”
Very little of his own music over the next couple of decades reflected the stripped-down sounds of those albums, but about five years ago he felt the need for another palate cleanser after his solo LP Scream was met with scathing reviews and anemic sales. He won back a lot of old fans with a triumphant Soundgarden reunion tour, and to keep his momentum going he followed it up with a series of solo acoustic shows he dubbed the Songbook tour. It featured unplugged renditions of Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog and Audioslave tunes, as well as covers and songs from his solo career. “The tour felt like a really special thing to me,” he says. “For the first time as a solo artist, I felt like I had my own specific identity. It allowed me to draw a line through my whole career and make sense of it as one body of work.”
When it came time to write tunes for his upcoming solo album Higher Truth (in stores September 18th), he decided to stick with the spirit and vibe of the shows. “I wanted to make an album of original material that serves this Songbook touring thing,” he says, “and makes it a living thing as opposed to a nostalgic one that looks into the past.”
To help pull that off, he tapped producer Brendan O’Brien, who he’d previously worked with on Soundgarden’s Superunknown and Audioslave’s Revelations. “I wanted the album to be intimate and small and so I didn’t want to hire a band,” says Cornell. “I also know how Brendan works. He’s very focused and very quick and he always makes the right choices. Some of it was a leap of faith for me, but everything I wanted to get out of our relationship I got and none of the fears I had came to fruition at all. I feel like I got pretty lucky.”