The Soundgarden song inspired by a mistake: “I had misheard a news anchor”
There is no right way to create a song. When you’re a band like Soundgarden, responsible for many albums, who have toured worldwide multiple times and continue to have adoring fans who persistently listen to your music, you aren’t subject to just one form of creative output.
Having a specific means of creating and sticking to it might promise quantity, but it doesn’t give you a reputation like Chris Cornell’s. He is a creative who acts on impulse, finds something he is interested in, and decides to run with it, regardless of how feasible it is. For instance, one of Soundgarden’s biggest tracks was the result of a mistake.
“I had misheard a news anchor,” he confessed, “And I thought he said ‘black hole sun’, but he said something else. So I was corrected, but after that I thought, ‘Well, he didn’t say it, but I heard it’, and it created this image in my brain and I thought it would be an amazing song title.” A song title rarely comes before a song, but this track was an exception. “The music was the inspiration that came from the images created by those words,” he said.
The song’s tone certainly fits the images brought up by the words. It’s a rock song through and through, but the chorus embodies an element of doom and hopelessness. Though the track is packed with energy, the means by which the words are delivered inspire very little movement, and it feels more like an acceptance of fate than a song to dance to.
Released in 1994, the song remains one of the band’s most popular and is waited for in anticipation by fans worldwide. While it’s nice to have a hit song, Connell didn’t worry too much about them at the time. “I didn’t think in terms of hits then, and I didn’t think tempo-wise or lyrically as being something that could be a hit. Maybe a single at some point late in the release, like an afterthought single.”
The magnitude of the song started to become apparent as soon as the band began playing it to people, though. What once may have been an afterthought started to become a dominating one. “Once we started mixing and mastering it and playing it for friends and the record company, everyone was singling that song out. So it started to occur to us that it might a single that would have broader appeal.”
One thing that rock music doesn’t need is scientific accuracy. If imagery is cool and a song is good, that’s enough for you to create something that will resonate with fans of the genre. Soundgarden discovered this, as what started out as mishearing a news anchor ended up becoming one of the band’s biggest hits.
