“In every way”: The albums Chris Cornell said influenced every bit of his songwriting
All rock roads lead to The Beatles, eventually. Their influence on popular music is seismic, serving multiple generations of budding artists and music fans as the gateway to the world of pop as a deeper, inventive, and inspired ecosystem of genre branches and roots to explore. For many, a curious spin of 1968’s eponymous double LP or a fascinated opening of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band‘s eye-popping gatefold triggers a pivot away from the passive soaking up of whatever songs are playing in the house to incrementally accruing music for oneself.
With Help! approaching its 60th anniversary in 2025, the Fab Four’s body of work still possesses an aura that encourages the listener to think about music in a new way, even after all these decades.
The road from Merseybeat to global Beatlemania was a dizzyingly swift one. Less than a year after their Please Please Me debut, The Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964 and won the hearts of America before their first number ‘All My Loving’ was over. From then on, rock ‘n’ roll was ancient history and the British Invasion had arrived to conquer the Billboard charts, The Rolling Stones later playing the show of October that year.
With their American distributor Capitol releasing revised and rejigged versions of each album—including the notorious Yesterday and Today LP—fans Stateside were exposed to a whole different discography and/or tracklisting to the original UK issues. While temporarily losing favour with the punk movement, The Beatles’ work proved hugely influential on a generation of emerging bands bubbling away in Seattle’s underground.
Eventually leading the grunge explosion that dominated the early 1990s, Nirvana’s love of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s taut, simple popcraft would shine all over his curt rock anthems that thrust the alternative to the mainstream, albeit unwittingly.
From Jerry Cantrell’s love of Lennon’s “darkhorse” songwriting, Melvins’ later cover of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ to Eddie Vedder’s routine Lennon-McCartney covers, The Beatles were in grunge’s—whatever that term means— DNA as much as West Coast acid rock and the hardcore that blazed the early 1980s. Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell was just as much a Beatles nut as his peers, confessing in 2011 how far back his love for the Fab Four went.
“I had stolen a stack of Beatles vinyl that covered their whole career,” Cornell confessed on The Howard Stern Show in 2011. “Two of the records were those ‘best of’ era compilations—those double record sets where one was red and one was blue. I listened to it all but I gravitated toward the later stuff. Even though I was 9 years old, and had no way of knowing, it was influential in every way as a songwriter and as a singer”.
Released in 1973, the two 1962–1966 and 1967-1970 greatest hits packages—dubbed the “Red” and “Blue Album” respectively by fans—were for years The Beatles’ only official best-of compilations. It’s as good a start to their dazzling output as any, two pilfered LPs that would spark one of 1990s alternative rock’s biggest names.
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