Chris Cornell could never escape the sound of Soundgarden, and he never wanted to
When they’ve started out in a band and then made a break for a solo career, most musicians find it hard to either move away from the sound they’re most famous for or, worse still, struggle to find success when they do try something new (here’s looking at you, Mick Jagger).
Having been the frontman for two genre-defining bands, Chris Cornell knew this better than most, who’ll always be best remembered for his work as the leading man and lyricist with Soundgarden, one of the pioneers of the sludgy, noisy grunge movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
However, once the group had disbanded, he operated under his own banner for a while, releasing the solo effort Euphoria Morning, before forming the post-grunge Audioslave alongside Tom Morello, Tim Commerford and Brad Wilk, and unsurprisingly, considering the popularity of his work with Soundgarden, Cornell’s debut solo release was well received, earning generally favourable reviews and positive attention from his fanbase, and even received a nomination in the ‘Best Male Rock Vocal Performance’ category at the 42nd Grammy Awards for the lead single, ‘Can’t Change Me’.
But it seems that Euphoria Morning didn’t come out sounding exactly how he’d hoped it would, which almost captures Cornell in two minds about whether to continue with the sound that he had found such success in his band with, or to press on with the somewhat different sound he heard in his mind when putting the songs together.
Moreover, considering the sounds that Soundgarden made, it might not seem like an obvious inspiration for his debut release, but Cornell once named Nick Drake’s Pink Moon as one of his major inspirations for the record.
“I don’t even really like his other things. The recording’s very fucked up. The guitars are compressed in this funny way. He’s not spending much time or attention on how it’s recorded. It’s very aggressive, though. You can hear the fingers on the strings. It’s so quiet you almost feel like you shouldn’t talk when you’re hearing it, because you might disturb the guy playing, which, to me, is very edgy,” he said.
He then outlined that he faced a roadblock with his idea of making a minimalist record, adding, “Ultimately, there are two problems with that. I wrote a lot of music and played a lot of instruments for Soundgarden; I didn’t want to suddenly put something out where I’m not as artistically fulfilled as I was in Soundgarden.”
Chris Cornell was a key driver in the sound of the band as they grew and developed over the years, so it’s no wonder then that he sounded similar on his first solo release following their first break-up.
You could potentially say that Euphoria Morning was Cornell’s attempt at making a Soundgarden album that sounded like one that Nick Drake could have recorded and released, as there are elements of both of them in the songs to a degree. Really, the record sounds like what you’d expect to have heard if Soundgarden had taken part in the MTV Unplugged series (as all of their fellow ‘big four’ grunge bands did), but maybe it’s better to just say that the album sounds like Chris Cornell, in the end.
