{"id":4174,"date":"2025-06-22T03:12:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-22T03:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/4174\/"},"modified":"2025-06-22T03:12:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-22T03:12:09","slug":"the-only-songwriter-chris-cornell-thought-was-timeless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/4174\/","title":{"rendered":"The only songwriter Chris Cornell thought was timeless"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Chris<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ TIDAL)<\/p>\n

Sun 22 June 2025 2:00, UK <\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible for someone to have their finger on the pulse of what people want to listen to throughout their career. It\u2019s one thing to capture the zeitgeist on a particular album and have it resonate for years, but artists like The Beatles have reached a new level of greatness by making music that every single generation has been able to embrace, no matter how old they are. And while Soundgarden\u2019s music belongs in that timeless place, Chris Cornell<\/a> always paid attention to those with a singular voice that no one could replicate properly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Soundgarden\u2019s music isn\u2019t going to be known in the same way that people thought about it at the time. Looking at the videos to a song like \u2018Loud Love\u2019, it was clear that Cornell was being framed as the chest-beating rockstar in the vein of Robert Plant, but while he loved a lot of their stuff, the strange time signatures that came out of the band as well as the altered tunings bordered on prog-rock in most cases.<\/p>\n

I mean, it only takes one listen to Superunknown<\/a> for people to realise what they were going for. None of the songs are in a conventional tuning, and even when they are in a language that people can understand, Cornell will throw in a bar of 5\/4 on a tune like \u2018Fell on Black Days\u2019 or make sure that the song ir produced like it\u2019s coming from the other side of the world like \u2018Black Hole Sun\u2019.<\/p>\n

Then again, Cornell\u2019s goal was always to make things sound weird. No one in the Seattle scene wanted to make music for the masses in the wake of the hair metal movement, so the next best thing was to find strange concepts to amuse themselves. But in terms of influence, Cornell always returned to what Syd Barrett was doing in the early days of Pink Floyd.<\/p>\n

This version of Barrett wasn\u2019t going to around for long, but Cornell felt that his work with Floyd was bound to hold up for generations to come, saying<\/a>, \u201cSyd Barett\u2019s lyrics, particularly on the first record, the music was frightening and dark but the lyrics were sort-of cartoony kaleidoscope circus lyrics and the contrast I\u2019ve never heard before or since. If someone told me it was a brand-new band, I would go and see them and think it was great.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that kind of contrast was both the blessing and the curse of Barrett\u2019s artistic identity. Looking at the type of kaleidoscopic shows that they did back in the day was one of the most powerful experiences any British rock band was doing, but after a few too many years, Barrett\u2019s mental collapse left people like Cornell with only The Piper at the Gates of Dawn or The Madcap Laughs as his true classics.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not like Cornell was only going back to the world of art rock to get his inspiration. Even when Soundgarden called it a day, the frontman was still looking to see what was out there, eventually saying that he was enormously impressed with what Jeff Buckley brought to the genre, despite him also not being long for this world. <\/p>\n

So while Dark Side of the Moon and Animals have earned their place among Pink Floyd\u2019s classics, it\u2019s important that no one forgets where they came from. They needed to move on from this brand of space-rock after a while, but the kind of world Barrett created onstage was always going to be one of a kind. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n

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Straight to your inbox.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ TIDAL) Sun 22 June 2025 2:00, UK It\u2019s impossible for someone to have their…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4175,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[5562,171,975,5563,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-4174","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-chris-cornell","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-syd-barrett","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114724834676136389","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4174\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}