![]() ![]() Up until recently I didn’t feel like that was important to me. Do you feel like you have an identity as a solo artist? So probably back as far as 1990 I was thinking about doing a whole album of acoustic songs, or acoustic-ish songs.Įach of your solo albums has a different flavour, be it the more rock-oriented Carry On , the sombre Euphoria Morning , the R&B tinged Scream and now Higher Truth. And the first time one of those got out to where a lot of people heard it was the song “Seasons”, and a lot of people were fans of me doing that kind of stripped-down acoustic songwriting. All the way back as far as the beginning of Soundgarden I started writing stripped-down experimental acoustic songs, and I’d record them on a four-track, and I was just doing it for fun. ![]() But this album has been a long time coming. The reason it took as long as it did is because I was also touring as a solo acoustic artist with the Songbook tours, as well as touring for the Soundgarden album, King Animal. When did you start focusing on a new solo album? “To me,” he says, “it’s always been, ‘What are we going to do tomorrow? What song are we writing tomorrow? And what’s our next record going to sound like?'” Over the course of an hour and a half, a relaxed Cornell – who returns to New Zealand and Australia in November and December for a solo tour – casts an eye over it all, but with one eye firmly on the future. At one point in our interview, Cornell laments the number of friends he’s lost to substance abuse, something that was brought into clear view earlier this year when he performed at the Sonic Evolution concert in Seattle, and was tasked with singing Mad Season songs with the existing members of that group – guitarist Mike McCready and Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin – in lieu of the fact that vocalist Layne Staley (also of Alice In Chains) had died of an overdose in 2002. And though not all of it has been received with the same amount of fervour – in particular his 2009 R&B flavoured album, Scream, produced by Timbaland – Cornell’s position as one of the world’s finest rock vocalists has never wavered. Along the way there have been side projects – most notably Temple of the Dog, which he founded in the wake of the 1990 death of close friend and Mother Love Bone vocalist Andrew Wood, and featured Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron and future Pearl Jam members Mike McCready, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament (the last two were in Mother Love Bone) – new groups (Audioslave) guest spots (he’s sung on releases by Slash and, most recently, Zac Brown Band, to name a few) soundtrack contributions (most famously “You Know My Name”, for the James Bond film Casino Royale), resurrections (Soundgarden’s reformation in 2010) and solo albums. ![]() In spite of this activity, or perhaps because of it, Cornell is at a point in his life where he’s comfortable looking back at a career that in some ways began the moment he left school at the age of 15, but really took flight when he formed Soundgarden. “The idea was to write and record an album that makes the Songbook tours a living, breathing thing as opposed to just nostalgia,” he comments. This last endeavour in particular played a big role in shaping the largely acoustic Higher Truth, Cornell’s fourth solo studio album. (He’s also just started writing for their new LP.) In 2011 he devised the Songbook tour concept, in which he performs songs from throughout his career in solo acoustic mode. In 2012 he co-penned King Animal, the comeback album for Soundgarden, the Seattle quartet he co-founded in 1984. Laconic in his delivery yet intensely thoughtful – he’s prone to long answers that occasionally veer off course but always return to the point at hand – Cornell is currently in something of a creative purple patch. There’s not, he adds, “a lot of down time”. Though the 51-year-old is at home in Seattle, and the tour in support of his upcoming solo album, Higher Truth, is still a few weeks away, the singer is filling his days not with rest and relaxation, but with “working on other songs and other albums and rehearsing and everything”. ![]()
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