Alternative Rock Singers

"I really had to come to the conclusion, the sort of humbling conclusion that, guess what, I'm no different than anybody else, I've got to sort of ask for help not something I ever did, ever. And then part two of that is, like, accept it when it comes and, you know, believe what people tell me. And trusting in what I have been told, and then seeing that work."

"I just read some quotes where Dave Grohl is talking about the Foo Fighters taking a hiatus of an undetermined length, saying, 'I want to be in this band forever, and that's why we need to take a break.' That's perfectly described. Did we need to split up and tell the world and the fans we're splitting up? Probably not. It was time to take a breather from the business."

"I think movies can replace reality and in the case of my story I wouldn't trust many people with doing that."

"I’m completely self-taught on guitar- limited me in some ways but very helpful in others. My only goal to playing was to write songs."

"My first memory of Nirvana was getting a cassette of demos, which ended up becoming Bleach. Everybody's response was that this was an amazing band and these were amazing songs. It was another indication that the Northwest had something special that you couldn't argue with."

"No favorites. I think of them [my songs] as children with strengths, weaknesses & secrets that reveal themselves over time."

"I remember seeing how Layne [Staley] reacted to Andy [Andrew Wood] dying from drugs, and I think that he was scared possibly. And I think he also reacted the same way when Kurt [Cobain] shot himself. They were really good friends. And yet it didn’t stop him. But for me, if I think about the evolution of my life as it appears in songs for example, Higher Truth is a great example of a record I wouldn’t have been able to write [when I was younger], and part of that is in essence because there was a period of time there where I didn’t expect to be here. And now not only do I expect to be here, and I’m not going anywhere, but I’ve had the last 12 years of my life being free of substances to kind of figure out who the substance-free guy is, because he’s a different guy. Just by brain chemistry, it can’t be avoided. I’m not the same, I don’t think the same, I don’t react the same. And my outlook isn’t necessarily the same. My creative endeavours aren’t necessarily the same. And one of the great things about that is it enabled me to kind of keep going artistically and find new places and shine the light into new corners where I hadn’t really gone before. And that feels really good. But it’s also bittersweet because I can’t help but think, what would Jeff be doing right now, what would Kurt be doing right now, what would Andy be doing? Something amazing, I’m sure of it. And it would be some music that would challenge me to lift myself up, something that would be continually raising the bar so that I would work harder too, in the same way they affected me when they were alive basically."

"No, I think that's the worst f**king thing. I mean, can you imagine having to get up at 4am and sit in a trailer while someone puts makeup on you? Then stand in front of a camera and say the same lines 60 times. I feel sorry for actors and I never want to do it. I stood in front of a camera in Singles and that's about it."

"It was given to me by the late Shannon Hoon, who fashioned it out of a fork he got in Denny's (a US fast food chain) on the first tour Blind Melon ever did, which was opening for us. I really liked it, but I stopped wearing it after he died. Because the other thing I wore was this ring that belonged to Andy Wood, who died. It's like, 'I don't wanna wear these f**king things from people who died.' A girl outside the hotel tonight had a similar fork, and I've had people throw them on-stage. I've seen hundreds of those forks, but it always reminds me of Shannon. They're making them cos they're thinking of me, but really it's him. Which is cool."

"I wish I had my dogs with me. We have a white German Shepherd and two Pomeranians. That's one big and two little. We used to have two big and three little. Then one of the bigs ate one of the littles, so we had to give him away. That was hard. We essentially lost two dogs in one four-minute incident. You have a sense of responsibility and a bond with this creature, whether it's a human or an animal, and we've always had an amazing bond with animals. We didn't even know we had that in common when we first got together, because neither of us had any pets. Then I got Susan [Silver] a cat from the pound, and she just freaked out on it. She still has that cat. It sleeps on her chest every night. As time went on, I realized, 'Wow', not only is she a great pet owner, she'd be a great mother'. I've noticed that when I get around human babies, the role of the pets changes. I don't know why. Maybe because looking into the eyes of a baby is different from looking into the eyes of a Pomeranian."

"When you write your own lyrics, you tend to be over-analytical. One second everything you do is brilliant, and the next, everything is garbage, and I want to be able to express personal things without being made to feel stupid. One of the first times I remember writing something personal was on tour. I was feeling really freaky and down, and I looked in the mirror and I was wearing a red T-shirt and some baggy tennis shorts. I remember thinking that as bummed as I felt, I looked like some beach kid. And then I came up with that line—’I’m looking California / And feeling Minnesota,’ from the song ‘Outshined’—and as soon as I wrote it down, I thought it was the dumbest thing. But after the record came out and we went on tour, everybody would be screaming along with that particular line when it came up in the song. The was a shock. How could anyone know that that was one of the most personally specific things I had ever written? It was just a tiny line. But somehow, maybe because it was personal, it just pushed that button."

"A certain scenario kept repeating itself. The people from the magazines would take two or three shots of the band. They’d start to pack up. And then they’d sort of take me off into a corner by myself. After about the thirtieth time that a photographer asked me to take my shirt off, I started to get the picture."

"Susan [Silver] was really busy with one of her bands, and there was about a month where I never left the house. I didn’t go out in public; I didn’t talk to anyone on the phone—I went a little psycho. If I hadn’t been alone so long, I would not have gone as far as I actually went. But one day, I went from wondering what I would look like with a shaved head to ‘That’s pretty cool.’ Then I put my hair in a big envelope and mailed it off to my wife. The funny thing was, I did this really silly, personal thing for no reason, and then all of a sudden it was on MTV News and in Newsweek, and I still hadn’t left the house. I thought it was strange, because I don’t know how anyone found out about my hair, and I don’t know why they cared."

"Susan [Silver] gives me a huge amount of room to be that recluse, and also the incentive to not be. It’s worth a lot to see her be excited about being around someone who’s not afraid of his shadow. It’s good for her. She digs it. But we’re becoming more alike. When she comes home to me from a day at the office, where she’s talking to people from all over the world about all sorts of important things... well, I probably haven’t answered the phone in seventy-two hours. She knows that when she comes home she’s going to get privacy, because I’m not like ‘These are my South American friends and... honey, have you ever really listened to that first Van Halen album?’ She’s the best roommate I’ve ever had. People are sort of perplexed, as to how this could possibly work in this grunge-music, super-druggy era where everybody is so emotionally screwed up. Not only is Soundgarden not OD’ing on heroin, but the singer’s wife manages the band, there’s no weird Yoko Ono trip, and she’s not trying to make us dress up like lions and unicorns."

"I was so fiercely independent that falling in love was a really terrifying experience. The first time I was in love to the degree that I realized this person has suddenly become so important to me that I can't imagine life without her."

"I always had a knack for it [music]. I bought a drum kit for like 50 bucks, and within three weeks I was in a band. Not only was I in a band, but people were saying that I was really good. Being someone with a short attention span who didn't have much patience for anything, that was great, 'cause it didn't take much. I could just sit down and do it instantly. I could play a basic rock beat right away, so it didn't require much patience, and that's probably why I ended up doing it. As I got some of the rewards for it, it fueled me to want to be better. Then the rewards thing gets old, and what you really want is to be good and understand it, 'cause you're so enthused by it. That's what got me into all the other instruments and songwriting and singing."

"Melody Maker: Did Andy Wood's death and then Kurt Cobain's affect your attitude to drugs?"

"Team Rock: Away from the band [Soundgarden], do you guys still hang out together?"

"I couldn't do it. I'd go there, and it just made me sick to think about sitting down and applying myself to the shit they were trying to teach me. Not that it's not useful. In a lot of ways, I regret it now, especially in terms of being a writer. I wish I had more skills and knowledge of the language. I have a fairly good vocabulary for how far I went in school, but I always wish it could be better. In a lot of ways, it screwed me up, but I just did not have the attention span for school. My mind would wander, and it would refuse to focus on something that, to me, was devoid of anything exciting or inspiring. A lot of kids really were excited by what they were learning, but I seemed to be a lot better at staring out the window and dreaming."

"Hip-hop kind of absorbed rock, in terms of the attitude and the whole point of why rock was important music. Young people felt like rock music was theirs, from Elvis to the Beatles to the Ramones to Nirvana. This was theirs; it wasn’t their parents’. I think hip-hop became the musical style that embraces that mentality."

"The rest of the band [Soundgarden] thought it was silly of the press to concentrate on the beefcake when I was writing songs, singing, and playing guitar for the band. Even now, some people will stick a paragraph about my hair in the body of a review."

"Well, we haven't had what I would understand as the sort of sudden pressure that seems to screw a lot of people up. We've been under pressure for years. Most of the bands I can think of that have had severe problems with success pretty much had their first or second album go over the top, commercial success like we haven't even seen. And for me personally, and to a degree the rest of the band, none of us are really super social in particular. So we're not in situations on a daily basis where being somebody that's famous is going to become really annoying, or you can't go anywhere because everyone recognizes you. I don't go out too much anyway, 'cause I've never really liked crowds or been that comfortable around a lot of people. In that case, I've been really lucky."

"What I hear in my brain (brain radio) dictates the beginning of any attempt at a new song."

"Yeah, especially this postmortem trip when people die and then everybody writes about what they felt that person is going through. It's really surprising to me that anyone can think that they have those kinds of insights or spend that much time really worrying about somebody else. I think they should spend more time trying to figure out who they are. That's my whole trip. I can't imagine anybody knowing me through my lyrics, because I don't particularly feel like I know myself. And I have more than the benefit of just lyrics to go on."

"Not really. I don't even have enough time to pursue everything I want to do musically. Also, there's a lot of people out there who spend a lot of time trying to act, so I think most of the good acting jobs should be reserved for those people."

"There's always a sense of camaraderie between bands. The only thing that I ever remember that starts to go outside of the normal healthy competition was when Kurt [Cobain] was slamming Pearl Jam. Once you get outside of your local little scene, lot of cases, writers will bait you and lead you down that path as cunningly as they can. I've seen it happen dozens of times. I've had people say, "Well, so-and-so said this about you, what do you say about that?" And they might be misquoting them, or maybe that's not what that person meant, or maybe that person was just in a bad mood. It's provoked out of you. They'll get you in a position where you start firing and they'll throw out little things about different people. But everyone that anyone would know as a successful Seattle band, or even an integral part of the scene, are all friends. Always have been."

"Yes. I battle with that all the time. "Let Me Drown" is probably one of the most disturbing songs I've ever written. Usually, if I write lyrics that are bleak or dark, it usually makes me feel better. That one didn't. It made me question whether it was a song that was all right to play. Should we even do this? It was so negative. But that's the only one I can think of that's like that. Otherwise, it's like watching a horror movie: It makes you feel better after feeling worse."

""Tighter and Tighter" was actually written around the same time as "Black Hole Sun." In fact, I did a demo with four songs on it to play for the band. "Black Hole Sun," "Sounds Like Days," "Tighter and Tighter" and a song called "Anxious." We blew off "Anxious" entirely and recorded "Tighter and Tighter" for the last record. It was the last song we did. It was number 16 and we ran out of studio time. We had the rhythm tracks done and it was just needing vocals and my guitar solos. We just ran out of time. It was falling flat anyway. I changed the arrangement a little bit."

"RockNet: Were you terribly uncomfortable at the recent Grammy Award Show?"

"The title came from us being on the L.A. freeway about three years ago. I just started looking at the traffic and realizing there was such an array of vehicles, from Mexicans in f---ed-up Chevys with dents and white guys in f---ed-up pickup trucks to guys with orange sun-bed tans in Porches and limos. And you'd always see these f---ed-up cars on the side of the road. The idea of seeing a couple of limos smashed into one another, I'd never seen that before, and I thought these people in expensive cars - especially the limos where the windows are blacked out and someone else is driving - they seem to have a feeling that they're not susceptible to mortality. During our trip down the freeway, I was talking to this guy who drove a limo, and he said that once this guy was in the back and some supposed vagrant came up and started knocking on the window. The guy opened the door like, "F--- you, you can't touch me, I'm in a limo." And a bunch of other vagrants came up and beat the shit out of the guy, almost killed him. The song describes that sort of decadence and this strange perception that you're so high on the social or political ladder that you're somehow beyond all that. But it's not true."

"Have you noticed how Lollapalooza isn't this multi-cultural, multi-sexual, multi-racial event at all? What Perry Farrell never admits is that it's just a slick rock concert with a good name and his ambition is to make a lot of money. Perry has a very good manager. He even has a percentage on the parking. It's a huge draw, and what people don't realise is it's far from being just the 'alternative college' crowd who go. It's very mainstream and very middle class. Even when we did it in 1992 with Ice Cube, the whole audience was entirely white."

"I try to solve my problems by writing music and recording albums, but you know what's really funny about that? Once the album becomes a success, it doesn't solve your problems. It just gets harder to write the next album."

"That shit's really depressing to me. I couldn't watch it. You can't expect to live in some utopia where everybody plays music you like, but it's gotten to the point where noone's playing music you like—at least that's being presented on television... The music channels don't even show much music anymore. They're more interested in documentaries. They're going to start doing documentaries about David Crosby's dog pretty soon."

"I don't know how everyone else feels, but I definitely go through periods of extreme self-confidence, feeling like I can do anything. Perhaps a fan will sense that, like in a performance, and the hero image creeps out. But then someone will say something, however insignificant, or I'll get something in my head and, all of a sudden, I'm plummeting in the opposite direction, I'm a piece of shit, and I really can't do anything about it. That's where 'Outshined' comes from, and why I'll never consider myself a hero."

"I've never been big into self-promotion. It's awkward for me. Just seeing my name on a T-shirt freaks me out."

"Somebody can sit at home and say, "What does this guy have to complain about?" But at the same time it's a comfortable chair to be sitting in and make those judgments. When all of a sudden you're successful and sought after overnight, you are instantly opened to a lot of sides of humanity that the average person is never going to see. And those can often be pretty disheartening, and it can make somebody pretty lonely."

"I think Euphoria Morning is an album you can always listen to, even in a couple of years; it isn't dated. That's what I was striving for with every Soundgarden album, something lasting, something you want to listen to, again and again. Since it was always part of my approach it wasn't too difficult to record an album like Euphoria Morning. I didn't have to re-invent myself."

"That Guns N' Roses video, the one with the dolphins in it ["Estranged"]. A big chunk of the video is Axl [Rose] coming out of this huge mansion on a hill with a bunch of servants wearing white and him getting into this huge stretch and having a motorcade of police wearing white ice-cream-salesman suits. Who the f--- does he think he is going to honestly connect with besides Donald Trump? Who else is going to give a shit about the fact that he can afford that kind of attention? It goes beyond decadence; it's spitting in the face of the people that have put you there. I was offended by it, and I don't get offended by much."

"I think Freddie Mercury is probably the best of all time, in terms of a rock voice. There was a vulnerability to it, his technical ability was amazing, and so much of his personality would come out through his voice. I’m not even a guy to buy Queen records, really, and I still think he’s one of the best."

"We were never looking for a different lifestyle. We weren't doing it for fast cars and big houses and there doesn't seem to be any regulation in terms of lots of model chicks following us around like idiots. It's not like we have to reach back and try to hang on to our roots. We never left them. Our lifestyles haven't changed. Maybe we're making mortgage payments now instead of rent payments, and we own the car we're driving instead of making payments on it, or maybe we're driving a new car instead of a $500 15 year old car. But we're still driving to the same places, we still live in the same neighborhood, we still have the same friends."

"Jerry Cantrell quoted in **{{cite web"

"Chris’s death affected me, but I wasn’t that surprised. He always had gallows humor about being lonely in hotel rooms. ‘The only thing missing is a noose,’ he’d say. And it was like ‘oh, Chris.’ And he’s like ‘[I’m] too tired, the road is too hard, too impersonal.’ He was darkly joking.”"

"To be universal you've got to stain the consciousness of the people. You've got to dig out a truth that everybody knows, but they don't want to hear, then tell it in a manner that's so articulate and so aesthetically indignant, so beautiful, that they've got to accept it back in their lives again. That's what I want to do. Touch something universal in your own language."

"That song is all about someone who's drunk with technology, who thinks they're the controlling living being on this planet. It's another one I'm not singing as myself.""

"A 20-page cardboard book with a line on each page and a picture to go with it. It's a fable, that's all. The music almost gives you this feeling of flight, and I really love singing the part at the end, which is about rising above anybody's comments about what you do and still giving your love away. You know -- not becoming bitter and reclusive, not condemning the whole world because of the actions of a few."

"It's about first relationships. The song is about letting go. It’s very rare for a relationship to withstand the Earth’s gravitational pull and where it’s going to take people and how they’re going to grow. I’ve heard it said that you can’t really have a true love unless it was a love unrequited. It’s a harsh one, because then your truest one is the one you can’t have forever."

"If you don't eat for a long time, food tastes better. The song ["In Hiding"] was about taking a fast from life, doing anything to get yourself back in touch with something real. Abstinence from anything is cool, because the normalcy of life is deceptive: It's enjoyable for a while, and there are good moments, but sometimes that's not enough. You start questioning what's the point. By not opening my mouth I was able to get into that state. Jack called me at the end of it; he couldn't understand what I was saying. It took a minute to get my speech back."

"It was during that same week that I was up there [In Seattle rehearsing with Pearl Jam]. Day four maybe, or day five, they did a Temple [of the Dog] rehearsal after our afternoon rehearsal. I got to watch these songs, and watch how Chris [Cornell] was working, and watch Matt [Cameron] play drums. It got to "Hunger Strike" - I was sitting in the corner, putting duck tape on a little African drum. About two-thirds of the way though, he was having to cut off the one line, and start the other. I'm not now, and certainly wasn't then, self-assured or cocky, but I could hear what he was trying to do, so I walked up to the mic - which I'm really surprised I did - and sang the other part, "Going hungry, going hungry." The next time I was up, he asked if I'd record it - so it was just me and Chris in the same studio that we made [1991's] Ten record. I really like hearing that song. I feel like I could be real proud of it - because one, I didn't write it, and two, it was such a nice way to be ushered onto vinyl for the first time. I'm indebted to Chris time eternal for being invited onto that track."

"One of the first people I met outside of the group [Pearl Jam] was this next human and I had no idea how he would affect my life and my views on music and my views on friendship and what a big impact he would have. These guys [the other members of Pearl Jam] know him much longer than me and his impact is profound. I'd like to introduce with great pleasure my old neighbor, Chris Cornell."

"Sometimes it's hard to concentrate these days. I was thinking about the history of this building [Eventim Apollo] and the Bowie history. So I started to think about that and my mind began to wander. It's not a good...So I haven't really been talking about some things and I kind of... now it feels like it's conspicuous because I lost a really close friend of mine, somebody who...I'll say this too, I grew up as 4 boys, 4 brothers, and I lost my brother 2 years ago tragically like that in an accident and after that and losing a few other people, I'm not good at it, meaning I'm not...I have not been willing to accept the reality and that's just how I'm dealing with it (applause starts). No, no, no, no. So I want to be there for the family, be there for the community, be there for my brothers in my band, certainly the brothers in his band. But these things will take time but my friend is going to be gone forever and I will just have to...These things take time and I just want to send this out to everyone who was affected by it and they all back home and here appreciate it so deeply the support and the good thoughts of a man who was a... you know he wasn't just a friend he was someone I looked up to like my older brother. About two days after the news, I think it was the second night we were sleeping in this little cabin near the water, a place he would've loved. And all these memories started coming in about 1:30am like woke me up. Like big memories, memories I would think about all the time. Like the memories were big muscles. And then I couldn't stop the memories. And trying to sleep it was like if the neighbors had the music playing and you couldn't stop it. But then it was fine because then it got into little memories. It just kept going and going and going. And I realized how lucky I was to have hours worth of...you know if each of these memories was quick and I had hours of them. How fortunate was I?! And I didn't want to be sad, wanted to be grateful not sad. I'm still thinking about those memories and I will live with these memories in my heart and I will...love him forever."