Chris Cornell

Thu 29th Sep, 2011 in Features

It can’t be easy being one of the greatest voices in rock history, and Chris Cornell is proof of that. Having fronted pioneering grunge outfit Soundgarden through the 90’s, Cornell joined rock supergroup Audioslave while battling alcohol and drug addictions.

He then went solo, releasing a couple of albums (including one infamously with Timbaland) before getting Soundgarden back together, to the collective applause of the music world. Cornell is now headed down under to sing through his back catalogue, armed only with an acoustic guitar.

Tell me about the upcoming Songbook tour and what Aussie fans can expect.
Well really it’s me and an acoustic guitar and some singing. And any songs from my career I feel like doing, or any songs someone shouts out that I can manage to do, I’ll do. And that’s it, really.

Is that daunting being out there on your own?
It’s something you kind of get into the rhythm of, it’s a little bit scary doing a show where it’s just me and an acoustic guitar, but hopefully I’ve kind of got comfortable with it. I’m fond of it, I’ve gone some places I’ve never gone before in terms of performing songs where they change night after night, and they evolve into different things. I’m always busy learning new songs and covers and looking at my back catalogue thinking about songs that I haven’t done that might be fun to do, and might work in an acoustic environment. That part’s interesting too, coz you almost never know, almost any song could be re-arranged to become a great song on with acoustic guitar and vocals.

I’ve always been a little bit jealous of the guy that could just stand on the street corner and play and sing a song and entertain people and be great. I’ve always felt to some to degree that’s a true measure of a musician in way. I remember seeing a couple of different bands doing Unplugged, and I always felt like most MTV Unpluggeds were kind of lame. It was just rock bands that essentially still plugged in, they just put aside all their electric guitars and played acoustic ones, and it wasn’t that much different. But there were a couple that really struck me, and one of them was Elton John. He just came out, he looked like he was in a very good mood and he sat down at a piano and just played a whole lot of Elton John songs. And it was phenomenal. It was really unbelievable, and I felt like that was something that I wanted to be able to do, to be able to walk out with a guitar and just play a bunch of songs and entertain people. And that’s something I started working on ten years ago.

I had a little bit of a promise of doing that too, going back to Seasons, that I wrote and played with an acoustic guitar that ended up on the Singles soundtrack in 1991, that got a lot of positive attention. I also ended up doing a version of a Soundgarden song Like Suicide acoustically that ended up in a movie. Fans started encouraging me to do an acoustic album and I feel like when Soundgarden broke up a lot of people expected me to do that. And I didn’t, but I always felt like it’s something I wanted to do.

So I’m releasing in mid-November a record of live acoustic songs that I did over the Songbook tour in the States, a sampling of some of it, and that’ll come out in November. And then I think my next solo record will probably be acoustic based, as simple as I can keep it.

Are you looking at doing that next year then, or what’s the plan?
Soundgarden’s trying to wrap up our new album now, so that’s been my focus. I just did a song for a film called Machine Gun Preacher, but that is essentially acoustic guitar too.

You’ve done quite a few songs for soundtracks, including Machine Gun Preacher, do you just do that so you get to go to the premiere, and how do projects like that come about?
First of all it’s something I like to do because it’s a different approach to songwriting. There’s a reason to focus on a specific story and not something that has to do with me or my life or my experiences, or something I’ve read in a newspaper. And also you’re writing it for the film, so it has to exist in there.

So do you watch the film first?
In this case I didn’t because the film wasn’t finished yet, I read the script. I guess one of the biggest visual inspirations was I went on the website of the man the movie’s actually about, and saw some photos and some film of this orphanage that he built in Africa. That helped me get in the mood and try to figure out what could do so the film would exist well with the story and the visual look of the film.

Moving onto Soundgarden, how does the new stuff you’re doing sound when compared to your older albums?
To me it always felt with past Soundgarden albums we were going in a few new directions at the same time… and it feels a lot like that. It feels like it sounds very much like us, but at the same time there’s definitely elements of music that we’re doing that we’ve never done before. It doesn’t sound like anything else, or anyone else, and Soundgarden was always that way. I’m really happy with it. I think it’s going to surprise people, mainly in that it’s not going to sound nostalgic, and it’s not going to sound like a failed attempt at nostalgia or a failed attempt at trying to sound like we did 15 years ago. It doesn’t have that feeling to me at all.