key words: chris cornell

former frontman of soundgarden, audioslave gets creative as solo artist

by stephanie classen, star phoenix , november 2008

The former Soundgarden and Audioslave frontman turned experimental solo artist will be in Saskatoon on Friday at the Odeon Events Centre.

Timbaland: Cornell's latest album, Scream, scheduled for release in February, is a collaboration with the hip hop producer. Timbaland has previously worked with artists like Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake. "His reputation is that he likes to work very quickly and so do I. It just seemed like a great opportunity to go do something really different."

Exercising influences: "I have so many influences. Even songs I did in Soundgarden included kind of old-school funk, rock, R&B and soul music. I knew that making a record with Timbaland I would be able to exercise some of those influences in ways that I'd never been able to do before in the context of a rock band."

Spontaneous: "Timbaland and I had no discussion with the record company about Scream, we just started making time in the schedule."

Busy studio time: "Timbaland would come in with a beat and some ideas and I would start writing the lyrics for it and coming up with the vocal arrangements and singing, all at the same time. It was a lot of anticipation and a lot of excitement because each song was sounding different than the last song and each idea would be different than anything I expected. It was really exciting and busy."

Solo: "I've made records with bands for so much of my career and spent really not enough of it being able to be spontaneously creative. I feel like this is kind of what I want to do from now on."

Band: "There are a lot of democratic issues when it comes to decisions you make creatively inside a band that actually create a positive environment. You have to be creative and ingenious based on a collection of influences that you agree on, which is usually not that many. That's actually a really fun way to make music."

Billie Jean: Cornell reinvented the Michael Jackson hit on his album Carry On. At first he thought the cover would be a bit of a joke, but it turned out in a way he really liked.

Bond, James Bond: Cornell's iconic rock voice took on the theme song for 2007's Bond movie Casino Royale. The song, You Know My Name, is one of only a handful of Bond themes that doesn't have the same name as the film. The last was All Time High, a song that opened 1983's Octopussy.

The voice: Cornell was named in a 2003 MTV/Blender special as one of the 22 greatest voices in music. He reached No. 12 on the list.

Audioslave: "What happened with Audioslave is we got together and had one meeting to hang out and jam. After about 45 minutes I just said, 'We can write a whole album easily.' I left and they weren't necessarily sure; they weren't as confident as me. They thought we had to go through a process. I'm not like that."

Soundgarden: Cornell's first band emerged as one of the most successful from the Seattle grunge scene of the 1990s, which also included Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains. The single Black Hole Sun was among Soundgarden's most well-known hits.

Fan response: "From the live show it's been amazing. I've done five shows where I play nothing but the new album from beginning to end, which is an interesting thing to do. The album is a one-hour piece of music where all the songs have orchestrated interludes that bring it out of the mood of the last song and into the next song. It's very much an album-oriented piece of music."

Reprinted from The Star Phoenix, Saskatoon - originally available as an online feature here

Chris Cornell Fan Page © Clare O'Brien 2008