ANN WILSON 'Was Not Surprised' By CHRIS CORNELL's Suicide

Ann Wilson says that she "was not surprised" by the suicide of SOUNDGARDEN and AUDIOSLAVE singer Chris Cornell.

The HEART frontwoman, whose latest album, "Immortal", features a cover of AUDIOSLAVE's "I Am The Highway" as a tribute to Cornell, spoke about the passing of her friend during a brand new interview with SiriusXM.

"I was not surprised when he died," she said. "No, I was not surprised. And I don't know why I say that. [It's] just something I feel from Chris. He was so complicated and he always struggled with mundanity. He was really in another dimension, and for him to be normal was really hard."

Wilson's latest comments echo those she made earlier this year during an interview with Rolling Stone. She said: "Chris's death affected me, but I wasn't that surprised. He always had gallows humor about being lonely in hotel rooms. 'The only thing missing is a noose,' he'd say. And it was, like, 'Oh, Chris.' And he's, like, '[I'm] too tired, the road is too hard, too impersonal.' He was darkly joking."

Cornell's friendship with Wilson went back more than 20 years when the SOUNDGARDEN singer used to jam with the HEART sisters at their Seattle home in the nineties. In 2013, Cornell inducted HEART into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. And on the day he died, Wilson honored the late singer by covering SOUNDGARDEN's "Black Hole Sun".

Ann said that Cornell never completed embraced his "rock star" status.

"I think about Chris a lot, because he was always at odds with his success," she said. "The expectations that were put on him being the voice of a generation, and a superstar of the '90s and 2000s and stuff was too much for him. It was really uncomfortable, and he wasn't just bragging about being uncomfortable, he was. It was too much. He basically was a real pure being, and complicated, but really pure, childlike. He had one foot in wanting to be famous, and one foot in just being so uncomfortable there, that he was caught somewhere in the middle. He was so beautiful and handsome, but tender. He was a really, really good person. But this world was just… he went as far as he could go."

Chris was pronounced dead in the early morning hours of May 18, 2017 after being found unresponsive in his Detroit hotel room. SOUNDGARDEN had played a show earlier that evening. The 52-year-old had sedatives and an anxiety drug in his system, but died by hanging himself. According to the medical examiner, the drugs didn't contribute to the cause of death.