chris cornell

by nick snelling, beat, melbourne, october 2007

His speaking voice is deeper than you might expect. Low, mellifluous and slightly burred. Not a hint of that unparalleled ability to alternate seamlessly from brooding baritone to stratospheric yowl and everything in between. And yet, this quietly polite man of measured tones on the other end of the line, inarguably possesses one of the most remarkable, if not greatest rock instruments ever, a voice as simultaneously influential as it is inimitable. Since those early heady Soundgarden days, when he came to fame spearheading the so-called Seattle ‘grunge’ groundswell in the early ‘90s, as the long-haired shaman-like figure whose banshee wail complemented perfectly the giant jangled grooves and Sabbath-on-steroids riffage of such seminal albums as Louder Than Love and Badmotorfinger, though the more matured intensity of their definitive Superunknown era, to fronting the more commercial rock supergroup Audioslave, Chris Cornell’s voice has always been a force of nature, an instrument of spine-tingling power. Now, two respectable solo albums in and his band days behind him, Cornell retains a cult of devoted fans all still in thrall to that almighty voice. As the song goes, no one sings like him any more.

The singer is in Australia piggybacking the arena tour of ultra-slick nu-metal crossover act Linkin Park. For those old ‘Garden fans, befuddled by the idea of Chris Cornell opening for a rap-rock band, take delight in the fact he calmly blew them off the stage at the opening night at Melbourne’s Rod Laver arena the other night. I put it to him that many fans may have purchased tickets to Linkin Park but were really coming to see him. Cornell is more gracious, however. “It’s a really good package, and it’s been probably the most fun I’ve ever really had on tour,” he says in a nod to his younger headliners. “When you put out a record, there’s always that discussion of who you’d like to tour with, and it’s always a hard one, especially as a solo artist playing hard rock. There’s really not a lot out there, so hopefully this mix makes sense.”

Besides, the Linkin Park support gives him a chance to reach a new audience, showcase the new album Carry On, as well as deliver an extensive trip throughout his long back-catalogue, something he’ll explore more thoroughly in the sole Melbourne side show at the Forum. “We’ve been doing two and a half hour sets with a really broad mix (of songs) from my entire career. It doesn’t really leave anything out – songs like Jesus Christ Pose to songs with me just singing and playing by myself on acoustic guitar, and everything the fans would want. From beginning to end, it’s a really satisfying thing because it’s the first time in my life that I’m able to cover that much territory musically in one show, and I like to be able to go that, the versatility of it. I feel like that it’s really an event for people to see and the focus is entirely on the music.”

Like all of Cornell’s material, Carry On has its share of immediate songs and those that reveal themselves slowly after multiple listens. Does he find he has a new perspective on the songs now? “Yeah, they change. Part of it is there’s always a difference in how they transform live and often – and this is something that happened to me even back in the early Soundgarden days – the songs you think are going to be the best live aren’t necessarily. A song like Outshined I knew was going to great live, but a lot of the others didn’t necessarily turn out that way. With Carry On, a lot of the songs that I didn’t think that would be that great live have turned out to be. I’m also doing different versions of songs, dependant on the night – just playing them acoustically if that’s how I wrote them. Songs take on a different life live.”

Even throughout his tenure in Audioslave, Cornell is someone continually songwriting. Does he slowly collect songs until the point he has to release an album or he’ll burst, or it is a case of needing to release an album so he’d better write some songs? “I kinda always have something going on,” he elaborates. “There are songs that just kinda happen, fall in my lap, appear in my head when I’m at an airport or whatever and I just try to remember them. So when I’m looking at a record, I’ll always go there first. When that runs out, then I go full-form creatively. I don’t really think about directions.

“Having said that, the next record that I make will be different – it’ll be the first time that I’ve made a solo album that follows up another,” he says in reference to how the first solo release Euphoria Morning followed his exit from Soundgarden, and preceded him joining Audioslave. Now, Carry On, is the result of him leaving that band. “So this might be the first time that I actually focus on a direction musically, hence before I never really had the opportunity before. That doesn’t mean I will,” he gives a small self-deprecatory chuckle, “because I’ve never really been good at that, but I might...”

Carry On boasts an interesting choice of cover song in Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean. It’s a particularly beautiful, frayed and heart-felt rendition, but as Cornell says, he’s always been one to tinker with unexpected covers. “It’s something I’m always doing sometimes I’ll hear a song and think ‘I wonder how that would sound if I did it, an acoustic version of it?’ I think it crossed my mind back in the Audioslave days when we were discussing whether or not we should play Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine songs, and I thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool if I did a couple of Rage songs acoustically?’ because it would be one way of doing it that no one would ever expect, so I started doing them in the middle of the set. But then I got bored and started doing cover songs off the top of my head without running it past the band because it was my moment when I could do whatever I wanted – and I was picking songs that would surprise the other guys. That’s where the Michael Jackson song first happened.

“I had gotten into a conversation with my wife Vicky about it – she kept saying why don’t you cover this song or that song, and I was like ‘no, there’s an art to it – you don’t just cover a song you like.’ But you can’t really explain that art – you either get it or you don’t, so she wanted an example and I said ‘well, like a band doing a song that makes no sense – like Johnny Cash doing a Nine Inch Nails song or a Soundgarden song – is one way. Or the other way is when a band does a song that makes perfect sense like Pearl Jam doing a song by The Who. So she said ‘ok, then what’s a song that you could do that wouldn’t make any sense but you could make your own?’ So I tried to think what was the furtherest thing away and I picked Michael Jackson – I’d never been a fan and I was probably seven years too early when Thriller came out and to me it was just pop or dance music to me and I didn’t like it, so already it didn’t make any sense.

“The challenge was in taking something like Billie Jean and making it really good – at first I thought it would be really funny, but when I learnt the lyrics and started singing it like I do, I found it wasn’t funny at all. It turned out to be this really legitimate soul-ballad lament and it became a great song! As I started playing it, people really responded to it. Mixed responses, to the point that I wanted to record it and put it on the record.”

With the track You Know My Name and its suitably secret agent-style string section, Cornell is now one of the few artists who can happily claim to have both Michael Jackson and James Bond on the same record. “It’s true,” he laughs, adding that the reason he even entertained the idea of singing the theme song to the latest Bond film Casino Royale, was because of a long and illustrious list of vocalists who had brought their signature voices to the franchise – Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, and of course, his idol Paul McCartney. “If there’s a list that Paul McCartney’s on, then I wanna be on it. Even if it’s a list of people who have a wife with one leg,” quips the singer. “I thought about that song Live And Let Die – when I first heard it I was like ten years old and I didn’t even know it was a James Bond song. So (You Know My Name) was kinda like a fantasy to be able to go back to that kid who worshipped Paul McCartney and say ‘ok, one day that is gonna be you – and this is gonna be your James Bond song.’”

The conversation detours to the question of Audioslave, the supergroup Cornell formed with three ex-members of Rage Against The Machine. Audioslave won Grammys, toured the world to stadium-sized audiences, and became the first American band to ever perform in Castro’s Cuba. It’s wonder then, upon the release of a third critically acclaimed album Revelations, arguably their best, that the band promptly broke up. “A lot of people might disagree, but Revelations was really my favourite,” begins Cornell. “I think we really focused as a band. With the first album, we were really searching and that can sometimes make a cool record, but by the third one we’d become more of a band. It was also the hardest one to write, in a sense, as we were having a time out but we were reacting personally to each other in the same way, and it was more of a struggle for me to make it something special. But at the end of the day, I think it was the best Audioslave record, and it sounds the best as well.”

So then, what initiated Cornell leaving the band citing that ole chestnut ‘irrevocable personal and musical differences’? “Well, there was a lot of stuff that had been hanging in the air for a long time that we never ever really dealt with,” he says openly. “Business stuff that was there from the very beginning in terms of who was going to represent us, song-writing royalties and how they were structured – but we got together so quickly and wrote the first record that we never really dealt with it. We kinda didn’t want to – we didn’t want the business side screw up the music. Then, we were forced to, as our two sides of management weren’t getting along. Over the years, whenever we’d try and get together and discuss it, the more we weren’t coming to any kind of agreement – it wasn’t working itself out.

“The second reason,” he continues, “was being in that band was forcing me to live in Los Angeles, and it wasn’t something I wanted to do.

“Finally, the fact that we’d made three records and I felt like to make a fourth record would require us to re-invent ourselves as a band, and as I said at the time, that would mean we’d have to dig deep, change how we write songs….and that’s a hard thing to do for any band. I know, because I’d been through it with one band when Soundgarden went from Badmotorfinger to Superunknown. It’s a major jump. Now, in Soundgarden it was the natural thing to do – it was my band, I was had been with those guys since it started, literally eating one meal a day and living above this trashy real estate office and I would do anything for that band – but with Audioslave, the thought of going in there and completely changing the way we work in order to make music that was viable and something I was interested in….I just thought, I’d rather do that on my own.”

“I guess I didn’t want to get caught up in the democracy and bureaucracy of what a band can be….I’d had enough of bands in general, if you like. It wasn’t to single out those three guys more than anyone else – I got along with them great and I think they are great people, but I had just had enough.

“From that point, I really feel it’s been the right decision – I’ve been enjoying my career as a singer songwriter and musician more than I ever have before in my life. And being in Audioslave helped me get to this point.”

Was he surprised to hear of the almost immediate RATM reformation that followed his resignation? “I was surprised, but I was also kind of happy,” he says, candidly. “There is some part of me that from the fan perspective, knows that that band is like no one else. For someone who has actually been in a band with three of the guys, there’s something that Rage had that Audioslave was never gonna have. And no band that I’ve ever going to be in is gonna have it.”

Cornell is referring not just to a musical solidarity, but also a passionate politic agenda. “That sort of militant political focus is not something that interests me. For me, music in a band should incorporate all the human experience and that’s just the way I am, and while I’m not critical of bands like Rage or The Clash who do have that focus – I think it’s great – Audioslave didn’t have it. So, one part of me always wondered if those guys missed having that. I mean, for the five or so years we were a band they never once talked to Zach (de la Rocha, RATM’s estranged frontman), so I guess I was a little surprised to hear that all of a sudden they were a band again,” he laughs again. “But I was more pleased than anything.”

Many Cornell fans will have noted a significant change in his voice over the years, he sings lower and his voice has a more worn, gravelled texture to it. The change has been accompanied by persistent rumours of serious damage to his vocal chords and talk of several vocal nodule removal operations. “I’ve never had a nodule operation,” he says straight off, “so that rumour is simply untrue. In terms of my voice changing, though, I think it’s…. normal. Considering how much I used to drink and smoke while we were touring, nowadays having given both of those up, I actually sing a lot better live than I did before. I have had to learn different ways of singing because your vocal cords are like a muscle and they don’t work and respond the same way as you get older, it starts to stiffen up and get thicker, so you have to find a new way to deal with it. I took some vocal coaching and put it to use, but not that much. There’s only so much that a rock singer can actually do to that’s healthy for their voice – rock singers don’t sing the way you’re supposed to. You just don’t and you just can’t. But I have had to learn stuff over the years in order to keep going.

“A lot of it is perception as well,” he adds, “For example, I can still sing songs like Jesus Christ Pose and Slaves & Bulldozers every night and never have a problem with the notes, but I’ve reached a point where continually singing in those really high registers doesn’t appeal to me any more. In some ways, I’m almost embarrassed at some of those old songs where I sang so high on. In many ways, I felt it had nothing to do with the artform or conveying the feeling of the song, but was more I could do that, so I did it. I’ve kinda moved away from that, and I’m glad to be honest.

“I know what my limits are. I can still push my voice pretty far, but the biggest thing I have learnt as a singer is to calm down and not overdo it, ‘cos in the beginning when I used to get on stage all I wanted to do was to start screaming like a motherfucker. Especially if your voice is on that night, the first thing you wanna do is push it. So now I have restraint so I can perform night after night and feel confident. I’m at a point in my career where I know I can doing everything vocally and it’s not an issue, whereas when I was young I had bad habits – I was smoking a lot and drinking a lot and some nights I’d get up there and my voice didn’t do what people expected it to, and that’s not cool. But now, that’s all over.”

Reprinted from Beat. Originally available as an online feature here.

Chris Cornell Fan Page © Clare O'Brien 2007