How a mistake led Chris Cornell to write Soundgarden’s most successful song: “It’s not something I can do on purpose”
Soundgarden’s ‘Black Hole Sun’ is arguably the grunge band’s most defining song, and given the amount of play it received on radio and music video channels despite not having an official single release, it earned the band a deal of mainstream success and crossover. Other acts, such as Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, were also experiencing a surge in popularity at the time, and this helped Soundgarden a great deal in establishing themselves to a wider audience.
The album that it came from, 1994’s Superunknown, became their most critically and commercially acclaimed record, coming four albums into their initial five-album run as a group. Featuring a sound that was far more expansive and covered everything from pop, psychedelia and metal, it is still regarded as one of the most groundbreaking and quintessential releases of the grunge movement, and Chris Cornell’s songwriting was especially praised for how it broke down the conventions of the genre.
‘Black Hole Sun’ sits at the centre of the record and sees the band dive deep into the psychedelic edge that they wanted to highlight on the release. The surreal lyrics came to Cornell first, and then the music was built around the dark imagery that he had produced for the track, with lyrics about the sky looking dead, foul stenches coming from the extreme heat of the summer and snakes being released into the world.
However, the titular ‘Black Hole Sun’ is perhaps the most powerful image that Cornell created for the song, and his pleas for it to “wash away the rain” and bring an end to all suffering and depression give a stark impression that turns the positive sound of the instrumental in the verses into a bleak and apocalyptic chorus. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2014, Cornell said, “If I write lyrics that are bleak or dark, it usually makes me feel better.”
But the story of the song’s theme doesn’t end with Cornell simply wanting to improve his own well-being by writing dark lyrics, and apparently the song’s title came from a mistake that he had made. While watching a news broadcast, he erroneously thought that he had heard the anchor say the line ‘black hole sun’, and while he wasn’t able to recall what had actually been said, he found the phrase to be thought-provoking, and that inspired him to start working around the idea as a central theme.
In another 2014 interview with Uncut, he shared further information about the song’s origin story: “I wrote it in my head while driving home from Bear Creek Studio in Woodinville, a 35-40 minute drive from Seattle. It sparked from something a news anchor said on TV, and I heard wrong. I heard ‘blah blah blah black hole sun blah blah blah’. I thought that would make an amazing song title, but what would it sound like? It all came together, pretty much the whole arrangement, including the guitar solo that’s played beneath the riff.”
While the strangeness of the track and its bleak undertones are undoubtedly what makes it so immediate and hard-hitting, Cornell believed that it was a rare feat for him to be able to pull this off. “I even liked the way the words looked written down,” he concluded. “I liken it to Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, where there’s a happy veneer over something dark. It’s not something I can do on purpose, but occasionally, it will happen by accident.”
