chris cornell: songwriting on an acoustic guitar

by nick cracknell, total guitar, november 2009

The ex-Audioslave/Soundgarden frontman has had huge success with his solo career, starting with Euphoria Morning in 1999 and this year with the Timbaland-produced Scream. Here Cornell shares his formula for songwriting success.

How have you found the transition from being the frontman for Soundgarden and Audioslave, to being a solo singer/guitarist?

In terms of the role of a frontman, the media always pushed me into that when [Soundgarden] first started out, and I wasn't even sure what [being a frontman] meant. I was actually writing a lot of the songs in their entirety. Like for tonight's [Download 2009] show, I didn't play a Soundgarden song where I didn't write the entire thing.

So the singer/songwriter part of me was always there. I would sit at home in my basement by myself - as well as writing songs with the rest of the band - writing alone. I was already there and just figured that when Soundgaden finished, I would just become a solo artist. And then I did exactly that.

How is it different to playing songs, like "Spoonman" for example, with a full band and then playing them solo? Did you have to make any sacrifices to do that?

None, because I wrote and recorded Spoonman acousticaly so there was no electric guitar on the original. For a typical show, I would normally do anywhere from three to seven acoustic songs in the middle of my set. I'll take songs that are written and recorded both acoustically or using electrics and transfer them to an acoustic set.

Although the riff from "Spoonman" was written on acoustic, it obviously lends itself well to electric because it's so heavy. And when I go on tour as a solo artist, I have a rock band with me who can do anything I did with any previous bands.

When you pick up an acoustic to start writing, do you start with a chord progression, a fingerpicked run or a barre chord, maybe?

A lot of the time I pick up my guitar - electric or acoustic - and mess around until I find something I'm interested in playing. Another method I use is to come up with melodic ideas in my head, and then try to adapt them to the guitar. That usually creates the most interesting combination: I hear a melody and pick up the guitar, find those notes and start playing that part. Whether it's chordal, a riff or whatever, it's always guitar-based in my head and I wanna play it on guitar.

To a certain degree [the idea] changes, though: it has to because the guitar is a colourful instrument and there are duplicate notes all over [the fretboard]. You could play the musical parts that you hear in your brain on many different parts of the neck and depending on what those parts are they can produce an entirely different effect. and that experimentation's important to the feel of the song.

How else do you write? Do you tend to default to a particular technique?

Well, I write songs in pretty much every different way you can think of. With "Black Hole Sun", for example, the verse melody - nearly the whole song - came to me before I touched a guitar. Then for the verse parts, I sat down with a guitar and played around with different root notes underneath that melody until I came up with what it sounded like on record. So the movement of the roots kinda came after the melody when I was just sitting and messing around with it.

The arpeggio part in the chorus is what made me tune the song to drop D because it was easier to get the right notes ringing. For me, to get a song to sound the way I want, it's important to figure out where I want certain notes to ring and where I want certain notes to be muted. There are a lot of songs where that becomes a huge factor, and also for someone else who might want to learn my songs, if they're not playing it in the right spot on the neck then it's not gonna be right. So that's an important thing to think about when you're writing on acoustic.

So when you're writing vocal melodies, do you work those out on the guitar?

Those are spontaneous melodies that pop into my head...I guess it depends; like I said earlier, there's loads of ways to come up with melodies. Sometimes I'm alone and imagining music, sometimes [the vocal melodies are] in response to something that someone has played, or a recorded part, or they can even be a guitar part that I have come up with that I then record.

You use some unusual chords - and not just in different tunings. We're thinking specifically about the song "Preaching The End Of The World" off your solo album Euphoria Morning. It must have about 20 different chords in it!

There are 27, I counted once! I don't think that's me being bored and trying to spice up a song with some interesting chords - it has more to do with what I was describing with "Black Hole Sun", where there's a vocal melody and what's played underneath it colours and changes everything. With something like "Preaching The End Of The World" I could just hear different places where the song could go to colour that melody. I was ignorant in terms of seeing the guitar as an instrument. I was sounding out chords in my head and finding the notes on the acoustic - and without really having the theory to back it up, I'd just sit there until I wrote the right chords. That approach has heped me make the process of finding the right chords I want for a song a lot quicker than before.

How do you know when to play around with different tunings on your guitar?

A lot of the time it depends on the song and having a melody that I want to play on guitar. I'll adjust the tuning to make it more fluid to play and then when the tuning is adjusted, it opens up other guitar ideas. It can even be the case where I hear a melody that's impossible for me to play, so I'll modify the tuning to make it easier.

Do you always write complete songs before you start recording them?

Usually, I'll have the whole idea - melodically, vocally, musically - before I record. Rarely will I record a sing if I don't know what I'm going to do vocally. I guess I'd feel like I was wasting my time: if I don't have a vocal melody and a lyrical idea, whats the point? That doesn't mean to say I'll have the lyrics finished, but I will have a lyrical idea going in to record the music. When that's finished I'll put the lyrics down because then I'll know what the phrasing is gonna be. I don't wanna waste my time writing a nunch of phrases that I like if they don't fit in musically.

So usually the lyrics are the last thing I'll do, but that doesn't mean the lyrical idea came last.

Finally, what advice would you give to young TG readers who want to go solo, especially writing and singing their own material live?

Play an acoustic and see what comes to you, then start writing a song. Also, learning someone else's songs helps you work out how to write, while building up your confidence in being able to sing and play at the same time. One of the things I didn't like about being in a band was that it had to be a loud rock experience for the music to work. It made me feel frustrated and inadequate that I'd need all this stuff to entertain people. You just need to get a body of work together that you've written where you can perform with nothing but your voice and your guitar.

Reprinted from Total Guitar November 2009