Chris almighty

With Seattle rockers Soundgarden having gone their separate ways in 1997, songwriter and vocalist Chris Cornell ventured out on his own and, two years later, released a debut solo album, Euphoria Morning.

However, whilst working on the follow-up record, Cornell was invited to join the line-up of Audioslave (comprised of the remaining members of Rage Against The Machine following Zack De La Rocha’s departure from that band), via the intermediary offices of super-producer Rick Rubin.
Cornell bid adieu to his colleagues in Audioslave in February of this year, due to “irresolvable personal conflicts as well as musical differences,” and so finally got around to releasing his second solo album. Titled Carry On, the record contains plenty of Cornell’s trademark hard rock, in addition to a few surprising curveballs, including his theme for Casino Royale, ‘You Know My Name’, and an acoustic cover of Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean’.
How has life as a solo artist been treating the singer so far?
“Pretty good,” says Cornell, sitting in a quiet corner of the restaurant at the Beacon Court Hotel in Sandyford, on the day of his recent support slot with Aerosmith at Marlay Park. “There are some aspects that make it hard. It’s a second solo record, but it’s kind of like a first one in some ways. People didn’t really get the chance to get used to me as a solo artist after Euphoria Morning, because I did a very short tour and wasn’t out on the road again for quite a while.
“And then I ended up being in Audioslave and touring as the singer of a band again. So I think there’s that issue, which probably would have been sorted out by now, if this were, say, my fourth solo record. I suppose I would be more established as a solo artist, although I’m not really sure what that means, or if it would be any different. The upside of it is that I was in Audioslave, we made three great records, and now, out on the road as a solo artist, I’m performing songs from pretty much any part of my history that I feel like, going right back to 1990.”
Among those Cornell enlisted to contribute to Carry On was guitarist Gary Lucas, who co-wrote the tracks ‘Grace’ and ‘Mojo Pin’ with Jeff Buckley. Cornell himself was friends with the late singer, and oversaw the production of the posthumously released album Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk.
How did Cornell first meet Buckley?
“Jeff was a fan of a mine,” he explains. “He came to a London show when he was on the road by himself, without a band. I think the day before he came, someone from the record company gave me a Live At Sin E disc. You get a lot of CDs on the road, and most of the them are pretty bad, but this was the first I’d one been given, probably since Nirvana’s demo, where I listened to it and went, ‘Oh my God’. It just made a huge impact on me. Then he came to the show the next night, and we hung out, and we became friends after that.”
Cornell, of course, first came to prominence as the frontman of Soundgarden, who, along with Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains and Mudhoney, were at the forefront of the Seattle grunge scene in the early ’90s. Indeed, prior to Audioslave, the singer had the experience of playing in another supergroup, Temple Of The Dog, whose eponymous 1990 album was a collaboration between Cornell and the future members of Pearl Jam.
“At the time we made that record, I thought of it as being a quick side project,” reflects Cornell. “Soundgarden was like my career band, and it was very important to my life and my musical future. The other guys in Temple Of The Dog, they’d had Mother Love Bone, and they were starting to form Pearl Jam. They’d just met Eddie, in fact. So Pearl Jam, although it hadn’t been named yet, was something that they were completely invested in and were very nervous about.
“Temple Of The Dog was really just a way for us to go make a record where none of us were that concerned about the outcome. The reason why that was so great, and why I think it’s helped all of us in our careers, is that all of us learned a big lesson. Namely, that if you can record and mix one album in 14 days with one or two rehearsals and it’s that good, and no one’s that worried about it, you can do it as many times as you want.
“You don’t have to obsess over songwriting, performances or production. It’s been something that I’ve carried with me since then. The guys have said that they were trying to recreate that environment on the first Pearl Jam record.”
Although Soundgarden first broke into the mainstream with 1991’s Badmotorfinger album, it was the band’s follow-up record, Superunknown, released three years later, that really sent them into the stratosphere. Did the massive success of the album take Cornell by surprise?
“Yes and no,” he muses. “I don’t think it would have been a surprise had it not been as big, we probably would have felt that it was par for the course. But it still didn’t sell as much as Nevermind or Ten. Even the follow-up to Ten sold more than Superunknown. So to us it was like, ‘Oh, now it’s our turn’. And still, even when it was our turn, it wasn’t the same sort of overwhelming commercial success, it wasn’t hit after hit. Actually, we kind of stopped that in a way, too.
“We put out ‘Black Hole Sun’ as the second single after ‘Spoonman’, and it wasn’t what we wanted to do, but the radio stations started playing it. Then, the record company wanted the third single to be ‘Fell On Black Days’, another ballad. We thought, ‘Look, we’re selling a lot of records here to people who’ve never heard Soundgarden, and don’t really know what the band is. And if two of the first three singles are ‘Black Hole Sun’ and ‘Fell On Black Days’, we’re gonna start selling the album to people who maybe aren’t going to like it.’
“We wanted to put out ‘My Wave’ as the third single, and the record company basically said, ‘We’ll do it, cos you insist, but you’ll lose momentum on radio and your record will start to fall off the charts’. And that’s what happened! (laughs)”
Did Chris find that his life changed dramatically as a result of his new-found fame?
“The big change kind of happened with ‘Outshined’, from Badmotorfinger,” he remembers. “It was all to do with MTV, and it happened within hours of being on television. We were in the middle of Mississippi, I think, on tour, and I went into a 24-hour grocery store at 4 o’clock in the morning. The butcher, who was about 45 years old, recognised me, and the video had only been playing for about seven hours. He said, ‘You’re from that band, you’re on TV.’ And I looked at him like, ‘That is just fucking unbelievable.’”
Chris notes his level of public recognisability rises and falls depending on where he is in the record promotion cycle.
“After we’d be done touring, and the videos stopped being played all the time, I could go out in public without getting recognised very much,” he says. “Then the new record would be released, and it would get harder again. Recently, it was easier than it had been for years in terms of recognisability, until the James Bond DVD came out, which had the video for ‘You Know My Name’ on the extra disc.
“Within two or three days of it being released, I noticed in airports that people who would never have known who I was started to recognise me. They don’t necessarily know why they recognise or why I look familiar, but it’s there. Like, I get old women doing double takes, and they might think I’m somebody’s nephew. They’re not really aware of why they look twice, but they do!”
Carry On is out now on Polydor.