Watch Chris Cornell cover Led Zeppelin song ‘Thank You’
Chris Cornell almost owed his entire career to Led Zeppelin. Throughout his time playing with Soundgarden and in his solo career, Cornell approached rock music like Zeppelin did in the 1970s, constantly looking for ways to twist the traditional rock structure so it didn’t sound ordinary. It all comes back to the classics, and Cornell’s way of interpreting one of Zeppelin’s first ballads is breathtaking.
Though Cornell could have easily made songs like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and ‘Kashmir’ work with his booming voice, he always had a soft spot for the song ‘Thank You’ from the album Led Zeppelin II. In the context of Zeppelin’s sophomore effort, the tune is a bit of an oddity. Stripping away all of the blues inspirations, this is a lilting love song that Robert Plant wrote for his wife while John Paul Jones plays a gentle organ in the background.
When talking about the song, Cornell loved how out of place it was compared to the rest of the record, telling Howard Stern, “It’s almost uncharacteristic of a lot of stuff off of that album. It sounds like a ’60s pop song to me, the way that they have it arranged. That with any other band would have been their biggest hit, but because the album is so unbelievable, you almost kind of pass over it.”
Cornell isn’t necessarily wrong in his comparison, either. When looking back at the other songs on the charts at the time, it would have been easy to mistake ‘Thank You’ for one of the other thousand hippy folk songs on the radio, with none of Plant’s trademark screaming to be found. Although the arrangement was finely tuned by Zeppelin’s standards, Cornell’s way of interpreting the song is much more barebones.
Taking to just an acoustic guitar, Cornell inhabits this song like he’s poring over Plant’s for the first time as he yearns for his lover to be with him. Although there were many moving parts to the original, Cornell’s cover is a great showcase for how he had grown as a singer throughout his years with Soundgarden.
From the start of the band’s career, Cornell almost had to be forced behind the mic, serving as the band’s original drummer before ditching the kit for the microphone. Throughout albums like Superunknown, Cornell dialled back his approach to include a softer crooning style on songs like ‘Black Hole Sun’ and ‘Fell On Black Days’, which he would soon take into his solo career.
Even when performing harsh vocal acrobatics again in the supergroup Audioslave, Cornell was still testing out the limits of his voice, bringing his range into the world of soul on the album centrepiece ‘Like a Stone’. When he arrived on Stern’s radio show, he was already a well-seasoned singer, using his vocal cords like a Swiss Army knife.
Beyond the range of his voice, nowhere is Cornell’s singing more emotive than on this track, as he treats his favourite band with reverence while adding a little spice to his usual vocal style. Any singer can make the listener feel something if they do nothing but scream into the mic, but Cornell had learned that it’s even tougher to show emotion by just singing with the force in his heart.
