The 1994 song too good for Chris Cornell to write: “I would fail miserably”
The music that Chris Cornell wrote always felt like it was coming from a completely different musical plane.
Every other band in Seattle was trying their hand at making music that felt underground, but even by indie standards, having a band with a singer like Cornell making twisting songs with time signature changes was a lot for most people to stomach. No one would have thought a band like that would slowly become one of the biggest bands in the world, but Cornell felt that he had only begun to scratch the surface of what he could do with his bandmates.
A lot of the best songs in their catalogue were already a bit more cerebral than what most people were used to, but when looking through Cornell’s solo work, it wasn’t like he wanted to make a carbon copy of what he already did. Euphoria Mourning was practically an acoustic Zeppelin record, but there were also more than a few strange harmonies that he picked up from listening to people like Jeff Buckley as well.
Buckley was already becoming one of the biggest artists in the world when the grunge wave began to wane, and while he wasn’t exactly alternative rock in the truest sense, there’s hardly anything objectionable about an album like Grace. Buckley’s voice was already one of the most beautiful instruments of the 1990s, but it was the musicality of the record that won over Cornell whenever he put it on.
Most people only saw a pretty face whenever they heard Buckley perform, but for all of the places that he could take his voice, everyone seems to forget how great a guitar player he was. He wasn’t going for conventional song structures when making the chord progressions to tunes like ‘Lover You Should’ve Come Over’, and landing on a song like the title track was what made Cornell fall in love with writing all over again.
It takes a lot for anyone to stay inspired after years of being in the industry, but Cornell felt that Buckley had given him the drive to make something close to what he did, saying, “The first time me and all my friends thought, ‘How did he come up with that?’ I would pick up a guitar, and ‘Grace’ in particular was one of those songs that would inspire me to pick up a guitar and play and find something that made me feel like that. Then I would fail miserably and put the guitar back down.”
But it’s not like Buckley was making some strange jazz changes every single time he played, either. Some of his best-ever riffs were only structured around him following his ears, and while he wasn’t in the same bizarro tunings that Cornell was in when writing Soundgarden songs, a lot of the strange key changes and vocal leaps had to be something that he practically channelled on the spot when he first sat down with a guitar.
That kind of magic didn’t just apply to his originals, either. Everyone has talked about his version of ‘Hallelujah’ being one of the finest songs of all time, but his version of ‘Lilac Wine’ is almost equally brilliant. Nina Simone’s version is still absolutely magical, but Buckley managed to put some real pathos behind it that only he could deliver every single time he got up onstage.
He wasn’t grunge by any means, but Cornell never seemed to identify with the sound of Seattle anyway. He always looked for artists who had a certain mystique about them, and whenever Buckley played guitar or entered the studio, you could feel the air change just a little bit every single time he opened his mouth.
