How Nick Drake shaped Chris Cornell: “This icy voice”
Chris Cornell, like many leading grunge figures, will always be one of the music industry’s deepest thinkers.
In Soundgarden, it was Cornell’s words and voice that drew people in. His vocals were especially charming for any hard rock enthusiast looking to figure out how to emote in art – just ask James Hetfield. But as a solo artist, that’s where Cornell’s real depth came through. As he once said, “I’ve always said that my albums are the diaries to my life.”
There’s a charm to Cornell’s music that’s hard to describe. As he once said himself, his musings never came from a sharp moment of inspiration. He wasn’t, in his words, someone who “looks out the window and sees something, then goes and runs home and writes about it”. He was more contemplative, more a quiet observer whose thoughts came through raw, before planting seedlings of artistic fodder.
As with most grunge pioneers, Cornell’s craft came from within himself – every thought, musing, or observation, as it were, ends up becoming its own thing through music. It’s the same thing you experience when you listen to a song and immediately feel an emotional connection to it. The words aren’t yours, and neither is the experience behind them, but somehow, it’s yours still. This was the art of Chris Cornell.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that many of his own favourite artists are ones who executed the exact same thing. The miracle of music, Cornell once told Billboard, was “tricking” people into feeling emotional towards something that’s not theirs. And if you also happen to have a voice like Cornell’s – naturally commanding and emotive – it pours out hot like the pages of his very own diary.
These factors, which make some of the most emotional music stick forever, are also what initially drew Cornell to Nick Drake. Someone who’s had a huge influence on many modern artists, Drake taught Cornell about extracting the emotional core of a song without being overly loud or commanding, which is also something Cornell explored more outside the realm of Soundgarden.
With Drake, Cornell saw a conduit for exploring other facets of his own artistry. He saw a gateway to that quietly contemplative state his mind was constantly in. And he saw a way to exercise emotional nuance without shouting about it too much – in a way that made the listener sit with their own thoughts, not knowing they actually belong to Cornell.
To Cornell, Drake had this inexplicable “viscera” that he tried to channel. As he explained, “I think of songs from Pink Moon, Nick Drake, where he spent very little time recording guitar and it’s really roughly recorded and it tends to just be one guitar. You can turn that up really loud and his style of playing and his finger picking is actually very percussive and very aggressive. And he has this icy voice that’s always exactly the same volume going underneath it. There’s something about that, that it’s still somewhat visceral.”
There’s certainly a lot more diversity to Cornell’s solo music. Unlike his projects with Soundgarden, he was able to explore the different corners of his own offering and offer himself up in more open and deliberate ways. And the emotional core carried in his words and vocal technique, tapping into that “visceral” quality he found in artists like Drake.
