Chris Cornell never really wanted to be your rock god. He just happened to look like one, sing like one, and accidentally write music that changed people’s lives—including mine. I grew up in a small, rural Kentucky town with no rock stations. Just top 40, country, and some oldies if you were lucky. Then one day in eighth grade, a friend put headphones over my ears and said, “You have to hear this.” It was Soundgarden. Superunknown. “Spoonman.” That was it. I rushed to Walmart and never looked back.
That moment led to everything else—MTV awakenings, the holy fear of demonic album art, a lifetime of chasing guitar tones—and eventually led to me sitting down with Chris in a hotel room in Louisville in 2011, and then again backstage at the Ryman in 2015. These weren’t just interviews. They were conversations with a man who could dissect the anatomy of a falsetto, trash the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and gently mock his own fashion choices from Temple of the Dog, all without losing the thread.
About the Hall of Fame: “It’s not very rock and roll at all,” he said flatly. “Rock music and a panel or jury deciding things about it—that doesn’t make any sense.” But if the fans want it? “Then I think it’s a good thing.”
Cornell could talk gearhead with the best of them—he once tried to unrelease songs because they were “sung so high it just sounded like helium”—but he was more concerned with the emotional payload of a melody. “I wasn’t born with a high range,” he said. “It’s something I became known for accidentally.”
He relived songs like a time machine. Singing Soundgarden live didn’t make him nostalgic. It made him scientific. “I remembered every little thought and emotion I had about it the first time it was written… and I can kind of continue to solve the puzzles and problems that came along with all of that.”
That obsessive drive extended into his solo work. Higher Truth was a response to Songbook, and it was deeply, unapologetically personal. Not “deeply personal” in a press-release way. Actual songs about his kids. “I think there’s sort of the natural course of songwriting when your life really outside of your career is your family all the time,” he said. “It’s gonna be what you’re thinking about.”
Was he turning into the cranky dad who hates his kids’ music? Not quite. “I’m kind of in step with them,” he said. “The only thing I ever did was… my son was listening to what sounded like AC/DC. And I thought, ‘That’s great.’ Then I realized, no wait, that’s awful. It wasn’t AC/DC. It was like L.A. Guns or something. So I handed him an iPod with thousands of songs and said, ‘You gotta listen to the right stuff.’”
Cornell also bristled at the way documentaries can rewrite history. “I didn’t want to ever see [footage], because it would replace my memory of the experience,” he admitted. “Most of my memories of those shows are like memories you’d have of when you had a high fever or something.”
We lost Chris in May of 2017. He’d just released “The Promise,” a song for a genocide drama about the Armenian people, and I’d been in touch about scheduling another interview. It didn’t happen. What happened instead was something far worse.
In one of our last conversations, he talked about feeling lucky. Not famous. Not respected. Lucky. “Our music, it seemed to last this far. And that’s good.”
He made it further than he thought. And we’re still catching up.
Watch the full 2015 interview above and then listen to the 2011 interview below.
