The one song Chris Cornell thought wasn’t right for Soundgarden: “A success unto myself”
No songwriter really stops being creative once they’ve taken time off. Anyone who is in a creative medium typically has their inspiration coming to them whenever the time calls for it, and if a song sprouts out of the blue, an artist almost needs to get it down on paper before it fades away. While Chris Cornell was more than willing to follow his muse in strange directions, he initially thought a work like ‘Black Hole Sun’ didn’t exactly fit with what Soundgarden was all about.
But, really, did Soundgarden ever have one distinctive sound? Sure, they had some common threads with artists like Led Zeppelin, but you probably weren’t going to hear Jimmy Page get as heavy as a song like ‘4th of July’ or make the kind of punky thrash on a song like ‘Circle of Power’ or ‘Limo Wreck’.
No, their music was all about exploration, and Superunknown was probably the clearest indication of that. Despite being the highest charting Soundgarden record, this is by no means a safe record for the pop charts. Outside of the lyrics about despair on tracks like ‘Fell On Black Days’ and ‘The Day I Tried to Live’, there are unconventional time signatures and strange tunings all across the record that make it virtually impossible for amateur guitarists to figure anything out.
While Cornell wasn’t averse to writing hit melodies, he was a little hesitant when ‘Black Hole Sun’ fell in his lap, telling Rolling Stone, “I felt like it was a success unto myself, being a fan of music and always wanting to write a song that would make you feel like that. I wasn’t sure if it was right for Soundgarden. I’m not sure if any of us were. Everyone responded really positively to the song, but I don’t know that any of us were a hundred per cent confident it should be on a Soundgarden record until we recorded it.”
Anyone with ears could have known that the piece was a hit just by the demo, but Cornell does have a bit of a point. The most successful Soundgarden singles up to that point had been tracks like ‘Outshined’ and ‘Rusty Cage’, so hearing a song that feels like a depressive side of AM radio rock wasn’t exactly in their wheelhouse.
Once they added the ominous slide guitar and the distorted barrage of noise behind it, though, it turned into something different. Compared to every other Seattle rock band, this felt like the love child of The Beatles and Black Sabbath, including a few squeals from Cornell towards the tune’s breakdown.
Then again, this does tend to sound a little bit like a Cornell solo song that happens to have all the members of Soundgarden playing on it. The frontman didn’t have the urge to go solo yet, but given how gorgeous the song ‘Seasons’ sounded off the Singles soundtrack, this was an extension of that kind of writing, which would only get stronger when he released Euphoria Morning at the tail-end of the decade.
Even the rest of the Seattle scene had to give it up to Soundgarden, with Dave Grohl remembering hearing the song and thinking it would be massive when it was played at Nirvans’s last recording session. It didn’t get released until after Kurt Cobain’s death, but as grunge was imploding, Soundgarden gave the world one last piece of dark sunshine.
