Chris Cornell

"It's definitely a different world. Smoking is bad for your voice, for sure, but you learn to function in that world of bad. Now I'm in better shape, and I'm much more physical onstage, but I have to watch getting winded. Once I'm winded, I don't sing right. I would have smoked three cigarettes already during this interview [laughs]."

"Oddly enough, I was in Paris, the last show of a Soundgarden tour. I didn't know him that well, but I had friends who were trying to talk to him and it wasn't working out. I had this idea that when I got home, I'd try and sit down with him."

"I had a bad PCP [angel dust] experience when I was 14 and I got panic disorder. And of course, I wasn’t telling anyone the truth. It’s not like you go to your dad or your doctor and say, “Yeah, I smoked PCP and I’m having a bad time.” So I became more or less agoraphobic because I’d have flashbacks. From 14 to 16, I didn’t have any friends. I stayed home most of the time. Up till then life was pretty great. The world was big and I felt I could do anything I wanted. Suddenly, I felt like I couldn’t do anything. But in the isolation, my imagination really had time to run. I never did any drugs until my late 20s. Unfortunately, being a child of two alcoholics, I started drinking a lot, and that’s what eventually got me back into drugs. You often hear that pot leads to harder drugs. But I think alcohol is what leads you to everything, because it takes away the fear. The worst drug experimentation I ever did was because I was drunk and didn’t care."

"At first to prescription medication and then to pretty much everything. I’d had several years of being in control of my alcoholism. I was pretty reliable; I took care of business. And then when my personal life got out of hand, I just got loaded. So I went through a couple of years of depression again. I didn’t eat, I drank a lot, I started taking pills, and at some point you just get sick of it. I was pretty sure that nothing like that would ever happen to me. Then I ended up having as bad a problem as anyone’s going to have and still be alive. So I realized I’m not special. I’m just like everybody else."

"I've always said that my albums are the diaries to my life. I'm not one of those guys who looks out the window and sees something, then goes and runs home and writes about it. It's more constant observation. I'm not a big talker and I'm sort of constantly looking and thinking, and then I remember odd things. I might not remember the list of things you would, I might not remember the things my wife would, for example, but I'll see things that show up later. As I'm sitting and writing a song I find that it sort of becomes about that."

"It’s that weird magic of if you sing a song you’re connecting to emotionally, it's going to trick me into feeling my emotions. I'm not feeling your [pain], I don't know what happened to you, but you have just tricked me into feeling my own pain and my own emotions and that is an amazing thing. That's this miraculous thing about music. Film can do it too, art can do it, but music does it great. That’s where making an album like this ['Higher Truth'] is exciting and special. The downside is you pretty much have to do it on every song. You don’t get a free pass unless you write a joke song, which I'm not good at. If I wrote like the [Beatles’] ballad ‘Rocky Raccoon’ or something I could get away from it for a second. A song about a raccoon that gets in a gun fight."

"That’s one of those songs that kind of happened in one moment. I just picked up a guitar and started playing it, and those lines just came out. I had a dream when I was in Seattle with my wife. I woke up from this dream, and as I woke up it was like I was sort of flying away above us. I remember feeling like our whole life is wrapped up in moments, but we have to be really aware because it’s so short. That was kind of what the song was about to me. We have to be really aware of every moment together. All we really know is that we have this life. Who knows what else is gonna happen? Let’s not let it suddenly be over and we didn’t appreciate it from day to day, from hour to hour, ’cause life’s gonna fly by."

"It goes back to 1989-1990, when we were at our most aggressive period in Soundgarden, and I just wanted to hear something that wasn’t guitar feedback. I started listening to anything that I could find that was super stripped-down. I bought the Nick Drake boxed set, and my favorite album was Pink Moon, where it’s really just him and a guitar. And then around ’91, I wrote a song called “Seasons” that was on the Singles soundtrack. It just had acoustic guitar and it got radio airplay, and I remember thinking at that point, “One day I’ll make an acoustic album.” It just didn’t happen until now."

"I was on tour with Soundgarden, and I remember writing down the title. The title immediately brought up the idea of the song, which is that someone is so distracted by a new person or a new thing in their life that they kind of forgot that they had given up on life. Sometimes it just happens without us even noticing."

"A lot more can happen in the world of singer-songwriters that I appreciate. This storytelling where you have the ability to sit and listen to it because you don’t have other distractions -- you’re not listening to what the bass part is doing, there isn’t an elaborate instrumental arrangement that’s taking you into Middle Earth and back.. For me just as a singer I think you’re able to hear aspects of my voice and my singing and what it conveys in ways you’re not going to on a Soundgarden or an Audioslave record."

"I annoyed the shit out of them [my parents] by spending my whole childhood beating on things. I drove them to distraction and I never thought they'd give me a drumkit in a million years. By the time I was 15 my mom had just about given up on me. But she must have figured that at least I had an interest in something other than drugs or being a criminal, so she bought me a snare drum. After a couple of days whacking that, I bought the rest of the kit for $50 from a guy I knew. Two weeks later I was in my first band."

"Kerrang!: Clare Sharp from Glasgow would like to know what you thought of your mum's appearance in Kerrang! last August [1996] - predicting the future for ten rock stars?"

"I was a sweet, pretty innocent little kid, but it didn't take long for that to change, for the world to beat me down. But when you have a baby, you suddenly realize that in them you can see that innocence and purity again, and you have the opportunity to protect and nurture that instead of being part of the world that beats it down. You get to be there for as long as you live to help support them and keep some of that alive. You know, it's great to be in a position to be the good guy for a change — it's a much better focus."

"I have two brothers, one of them was older, he was the guy I thought was the coolest person on earth. I was a little guy and he would beat the shit out of anybody who would fuck with me and sometimes I had to actually beg him not to beat someone up just in case I ran into that person when he wasn't around... He also introduced me to a lot of music and he's a singer-songwriter as well, I'm going to bring him out. This is my brother Peter!"

"When Andy [Andrew Wood] died, I couldn't listen to his songs for about two years after that, and it was for that reason — his lyrics often seem as though they can tell that story. But then again, my lyrics often could tell the same one. In terms of seeing everything as a matter of life and death — if that's what you're feeling at the time, then that's what you're going to write. It's sort of a morbid exchange when somebody who is a writer like that dies, and then everyone starts picking through all their lyrics. In Kurt [Cobain]'s case, whatever he was thinking and whatever he was writing, there wasn't an arrow pointing at what his demise was. It's a stream of thought, it's a possibility — it's definitely something that somebody was feeling when they were writing. It doesn't mean that it's going to happen. But it doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't, either."

"I remember a girl once came up to me after one of our shows, and she had a painting of Andy Wood on the back of her leather coat. She said, "I respect you so much for recording a tribute to Andy Wood, because he was so perfect," and then she walked away. Why would she walk away thinking that? Out of whatever songs he wrote and how he died, how did you get that? His lyrics basically said, line for line, "I'm fucked up." He could have written a song called "I'm Fucked Up", and it would have basically summed up a lot of the lyrics he wrote. And this girl wanders away thinking the guy's perfect."

"The funeral was very surreal. I was happy for him, because it was packed, and they were showing films of him performing. He was a fuckin’ rock star the day he was born – it didn’t matter if he’d never sold a single record. He was the only rock star I ever met."

"I don’t know if you can ever take him [ Andrew Wood ] out of [my heart and soul]. There was a period of time when he would sit in his bedroom across the hall from mine and we would kind of have these dueling four-track demos and songs. He wasn’t doing it for Malfunkshun and me doing it for Soundgarden; it had nothing to do with that. It was us just having fun. Maybe you can look at it as songwriting exercises? We were always kind of neck and neck. We were very different from each other in terms of our approach. He was very free and didn’t necessarily have a critical voice while he was in the process of writing a song. He would just do anything. I on the other hand, not only do I have a critical voice, I have sort of an editorial staff and what that creates is something kind of completely different."

"I think we all carry a depressive streak in us but most people just hide it. A lot of people think that entertainment has to be something loud, cheerful and happy. I don't buy into it. Depression can be very inspiring. At least for me it can be. The quiet aspects of life are very important, because let's face it, life is pretty difficult."

"I think everybody, no matter how rich or poor, how young or old, has a phase in his life when he's depressive. It's reality. Not a lot of people want to talk about it. Most people rather hide that fact, but it's just one of the facts of life that absolutely fascinates me."

"I used to work in jobs I hated because I needed the money to buy a guitar. I know what it feels like to be depressed. On the other hand, I also know what it feels like to have money, to be successful, to be independent, but I can tell you that money and success never solve your problems."

"Something I've done since I was a kid – of opening windows and imagining what it would be like to jump. But I never take it seriously."

"I was depressed for a long time. If you’re depressed long enough, it’s almost a comfort, a state of mind that you’ve made peace with because you’ve been in it so long. It’s a very selfish world."

"Guitar.com: he tone of Euphoria Morning is kind of melancholy."

""Fell On Black Days" was like this ongoing fear I've had for years. It took me a long time to write that song. We've tried to do three different versions with that title, and none of them have ever worked," he said. "It's a feeling that everyone gets. You're happy with your life, everything's going well, things are exciting - when all of a sudden you realize you're unhappy in the extreme, to the point of being really, really scared. There's no particular event you can pin the feeling down to, it's just that you realize one day that everything in your life is fucked!"

""The Day I Tried to Live" has nothing to do with suicide. It's much more meant to be like everyman's story. In spite of how most people present themselves, they probably struggle to feel comfortable or normal around other people, to feel as if they fit in. Everybody wants to and tries to. That's what that song is about. And "Like Suicide" is just a title. It's not about suicide at all."

"I don't think anyone can safely resolve that's why Kurt Cobain killed himself [for getting hassled by people]. I mean, I don't really bother theorising on suicides, but I'm sure it was more than that. It was common knowledge that Kurt had a serious fucking health problem and he had it for years, well before he was ever famous. Whenever people talk about drugs and death, they put Kurt in a category of drug death, which is not the case. The fact that he was taking drugs was also based on the fact that he had serious health problems that nobody could seem to help him out with. Drugs were one way of relieving pain. I'm sure there were also problems with the fact that he couldn't go anywhere. He felt self-conscious about being a teen idol, which was something he didn't want to be. And there was always that issue that he was sick - and that didn't necessarily have to do with drugs or the fact that he was famous. It all points to something else. It wasn't just: this guy's a heroin addict and it made him crazy and he killed himself. Or: this guy gets bothered by teenagers and he hates it so he killed himself. That's probably the most romantic view, but it's not the most real view. You don't know what drives somebody to do that, but if I ever committed suicide, I would do it in a way that meant no one ever knew that it was suicide - because to me, the biggest fear of killing myself would be what it would do to my friends and family. If things are fucked enough that I want to kill myself, the last thing I want to do is go out and really fucking hurt a bunch of other people."

"Maybe Kurt [Cobain] meant it [to mention suicide in his lyrics]; maybe he didn't. We're never going to know. When Andy Wood died, there were tons of lyrics that he wrote that sort of alluded to, well, it's possible that it's going to happen. It's not likely I'm going to kill myself, but those lyrics are still there."

"Request Magazine: And now we're back to suicide. Some months have passed now since Kurt [Cobain] killed himself. Judging from his suicide note, it seems as if he thought there was something that was being demanded of him by the music industry or fans or someone, that he either couldn't or didn't want to deliver."

"I've had close friends who were on the verge of having nervous breakdowns or having one, and would walk into a room and be together. I think everyone struggles. And it's hard to be critical. I'm not somebody else, I'm not in anyone else's skin; I don't know what they are thinking or what they are going through or why they do what they do. I know what it feels like to be suicidal, and I know what it feels like to be hopeless. There is some point where I learnt enough about myself to know that I don't have the tolerance to create other hurdles as well. If I would have ever started taking drugs when I was younger, I would never have lived. I would have gone out quick. I don't have the tolerance to live in that emotional and physical pain and not have anything positive or good around me. I think that as far as the life that I have, I couldn't imagine it being any better. And even with that I still get down-spirited a lot, so... (laughs). If I look at it that way, I wouldn't want to make it any worse."

"There was a time in the middle of my depression when I basically stopped eating. I wasn’t doing it to lose weight or anything — I just forgot to eat. I got down to 145 pounds, which is pretty skinny. I'm 6'3". And then I read an article in a magazine by a doctor talking about his experiences with anorexia, and everything started to make sense — the aches in the joints, the headaches, the way my bones felt as if I could bend them with my hands. I started eating again. That was much better."

"If you knew someone who was terminally ill and in grave pain, would you participate in an assisted suicide? I would."

"I don’t really remember writing it [The Day I Tried To Live]. I vaguely remember the verse. It was based on a tuning that Ben Shepherd had came up with. Lyrically, it was one of those songs that I thought everyone could connect with. ‘Fell On Black Days’ is maybe a sister song to it. It’s this feeling that could come over anyone, and has probably happened to everyone. ‘Fell On Black Days’ is the feeling of waking up one day and realizing you’re not happy with your life. Nothing happened, there was no emergency, no accident, you don’t know what happened. You were happy, and one day you just aren’t, and you have to try to figure that out."

"Rolling Stone: What was your headspace at the time of Superunknown? A lot of the lyrics are dark."

"Every time I know we have to go out on tour, there’s about three or four weeks where I’m terrified—where I start thinking: That’s not me. I’m not Freddie Mercury. Then I go out onstage and it’s like diving into the cold Puget Sound after spending five weeks in Hawaii—there’s a shock to the system, but the fear goes away. You get used to it, which is pretty cool, because if I stopped performing, I could just disappear and end up being some weird chattering man that walks the streets in rags, staring only at the pavement. At first you rationalize that going to a club where people recognize you is a bad idea; then going to a neighborhood bar becomes a bad idea, too. Going to the grocery store becomes a bad idea. Answering the phone becomes a bad idea. Then every time the dog barks, you think the National Guard is on your roof ready to drill holes in the shingles and shoot at you. So I have to deal with the outside world on sort of a maintenance level—go out to a bar every so often and just be around people."

"We're all a bit socially awkward in our band at the best of times, and while we're more comfortable with the fan thing now, it's still odd and slightly surreal. I have friends who are celebrities who're a lot more extrovert and social than me, and they can't lead a normal life because they're so recognisable. It's changed their lives a lot and they can't change it back."

"I've always been really anti-social, and being relatively famous has just given me an excuse to go out even less. If I didn't play in Soundgarden I'd have no excuse for being the way I am. My friends and family would hate me, whereas now they probably feel sorry for me. Y'know, 'Poor kid, he can't come out because he gets hassled a lot.'"

"Request Magazine: Many of your songs, including new ones like "Black Hole 5un" and "Fourth of July," trade in dark, apocalyptic imagery. Does any of that flair for the dramatic come from your having grown Catholic?"

"I don't follow any particular one [religion]. Ultimately I think I'm sort of a freethinker and kind of open. So many bad things–as well as good things–have happened based on people just sort of blindly following religion that I kind of feel like I want to stay away from any type of specific denomination or any religion period. If for no other reason than just that. I don't want to be involved with anything or condone any school of thought that at some point and in some way causes the death of innocent people, or tragedies where initial fantastic ideas [are] distorted. Like the life, for example, of Jesus is well-documented. It's corroborated by different people, who had different backgrounds, and different levels of education. And they wrote about it. We know that this guy existed, and we know pretty much what he said, and it's pretty simple. Everything from that point on in terms of wars and fighting over land and territories and religious things, none of that was even included in anything he said. His message was pretty simple, be really nice to each other and everything will be okay."

"The more info I read, the more the Rock & Roll hall of fame seems anti-rock. Rock was not meant to be judged by panels of old people."

"I would hope it is a when, as opposed to an if. How about Gene Simmons?"

"Inducting Heart into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame was an eye-opening experience. I was certainly honored, but had always had a cynical attitude about an institution like this as it pertains to Rock 'n' Roll in general. The fan support of all the bands inducted and their emotional enthusiasm changed everything for me."

"HBO Q&A session, quoted in **"

"To be honest, it doesn't really make any difference to me. I'm not trying to be negative about it. The one thing about inducting Heart was that I was actually really moved by their fans, and the fans were the people in the cheap seats that were screaming, and they were outside saying hi every time you'd come and go over the course of the two days. That was when it made sense to me, that it matters to the fans, and if it matters to the fans, then I think it matters. But they deserve ownership of it."

"We were really kind of nervous. You know when you're talking to someone who you really like and you forget everything you want to say. I was just going, 'Hi,' and Chris goes, 'Hi." Then I went, 'Oh fuck, I don't know what to say.' I wasn't going to go, 'You're real cool man,' so I said, 'Can you sign this?' I got him to sign this bank withdrawal card and he filled it all in and everything. It was a classic. Chris wrote 'Tough Guy' for his name and the withdrawal was for like three million dollars or something."

"Chris and I got married in '90 and we've been together since '85. We learned, luckily, sort of early on, that we needed to make time for business and that I couldn't bring business home every day, as was my inclination. It was such an exciting time time for me in the late-eighties and early-nineties; they were pretty unbelievable. Just to feel things brewing in the late-eighties without having the goal of ' we're gonna make this into an international superstardom'. But just that it was growing and we were all gathering experience and momentum. And those were really exciting times that I wanted to talk about twenty-four hours a day. I needed to learn not to bring business home so I wouldn't strictly represent business every time I walked in the door. [Chris and I] just created boundaries. Our relationship is a little-known secret because it's nobody's fuckin' business [laughing]!"

"I met Chris at the end of '85 at a Halloween party, at an artist studio in Belltown, and I was out on the town that night with my dear frien Chuck, a.k.a. Upchuck from the Fags. And Chuck dresses me up as him in drag – he was in drag most of the time – so I had a long blond fright wig and a kimono and pancake makeup. Soundgarden was playing the party, as a three-piece, with Chris on drums and vocals. They were amazing. I'd worked with Ben McMillan in a vintage clothing store in town called Tootsie's. And Chris came in to talk to him, and the story that Chris told me is that I caught his eye. So he kept coming in and trying to get my attention, but I paid him no mind. Partly because I had just broken up with Gordon earlier that year, so I was in a pretty dark space. After the band played, Chris came up to me and recognized me, which he got huge points for because I was in full drag-queen regalia. He said the band were trying to get a show in Vancouver, so I told him that I was going up there to a show in the next week, and if he wanted to meet, I would take a tape for them. So we met, and he gave me that tape, and we saw each other a week later at the Vogue. After that, we went to a 24-hour dinner. We tried to go back to my house, but I'd lost my keys. We made out for a while, and then he took me to my mom's in West Seattle, and it was just on from there. At the time, it was healing for me."

"The shirtlessness? I never even thought about it. Honest to God, it's just what he does. Love is blind, I suppose. The female attention never fuffled me. I felt we had such security in our relationship then that it never occured to me. I remember a show in Philadelphia in the early '90s, some girl got on her boyfriend's shoulder and was screaming, "Chris, I wanna fuck you!" or some other equally poetic phrase. Come on. You're embarrassing out entire sisterhood here."

"Alice in Chains filmed the show at Moore theatre in 1990 and that was the show this new band Mookie Blaylock opened for them. Everyone was still reeling from Andy [Andrew Wood]'s death... and they hadn't really played out yet. The band came on and Chris [Cornell] carried Eddie [Vedder] onto the stage – he was on his shoulders. It was one of those super powerful moments, where it was all a big healing for everybody. He came out as this guy who had all the credibility in the world - in terms of people in Seattle - and Malfunkshun and Mother Love Bone were loved bands. Andy was such an endearing personality. It was a hard thing to do - to show up after people die. And Chris bringing Eddie out, and pointing at him, as much to say, 'This is your guy now.'"

"Chris has a very penetrating and unique artistic vision that, when melded with ours, makes for a unique band chemistry. It's such a different vibe than any of us has ever experienced before. There's a great deal of camaraderie."