Strange Magic: the song Slash called “most orthodox”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what kind of music Slash excels at. From the minute that he picked up a guitar, it felt like he was destined to play rock music, so the idea of him trying his hand at playing funk guitar like Nile Rodgers or something atmospheric like Radiohead just feels wrong. That’s not to say that he couldn’t break new ground, and when putting together his first solo album, ‘Promise’ became one of the more adventurous tunes that he ever laid down.
Then again, the entire premise of his solo record was already meant to be a fish out of water. Since he had already made his living as one of the premier rock guitarists of his time, he wanted to reverse his time as a studio musician by having the biggest stars in the world come to him to lay down some vocals.
After many people immediately said yes, the album runs the gamut from his signature hard rock sound with Myles Kennedy to pop with Adam Levine and even flirting with metal with M Shadows of Avenged Sevenfold. If any song was going to be a bit bizarre, it was bound to be when he was working with Chris Cornell.
Because of Cornell’s many similarities with industry giants like Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, he usually had an art-rock edge to him. Listening back to those early Soundgarden, most people are going to hear the heavy riffs, but some tunes don’t adhere to the usual time signatures in rock or have some kind of strange tuning that makes it sound like aliens recorded it.
Even though the song does not have abnormal tunings, Slash talked about the entire thing being tough to put together, saying, “‘Promise’ was probably the most unorthodox piece of music that I’d written; it was very different. It was one of those things. I don’t know why I thought of [Chris] for that song more than any of the others, but I sent it to him, and within 48 hours, he sent me this great lyric, and we were off and running.”
Granted, there is a lot more moodiness behind the song than what many people are used to hearing from Slash. There aren’t as many lyrical guitar parts, but that’s because when you have someone who’s as much of a powerhouse as Cornell, it’s probably best to just get the hell out of the way when he’s singing.
When the guitars do come in, though, Slash managed to sprinkle in lead licks that could have fit on a Guns N’ Roses project, complete with the down-and-dirty guitar tone that a band like Aerosmith would kill to have under their belts. But compared to what both men had worked with in the past, ‘Promise’ is probably the closest to a pop song they could muster.
Since Cornell had just come off an incredibly shaky album with Scream, hearing him with Slash was the kind of pop crossover that actually made sense. Both of them had their own supergroups that they founded in the 2000s, but this one track somehow managed to put both Audioslave and Velvet Revolver to shame.
