CHRIS CORNELL: I Know 'Scream' Is A Great Album

Former SOUNDGARDEN/AUDIOSLAVE singer Chris Cornell was interviewed on the March 24, 2009 edition of NBC-TV's "Last Call with Carson Daly". Watch the eight-minute segment below.

Cornell recently spoke to Jason Newman of Metromix about his latest solo album, "Scream". A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metromix: The early reviews of "Scream" have been pretty scathing. Have you read any of them?

Cornell: I haven't really read any, but I hear about them here and there. But I know what the record is. Depending on what album [I make], I can have a hard or easy time with objectivity. With "Scream", I have a really easy time because it's so different. And I know it's a great album. I also know it's an easy target. I go online and the negative versus positive comments about "Scream" are age-specific: old people don't like it and young people love it, or young people aren't angry at it at least.

Metromix: Do you think it's a question of critics not understanding the album?

Cornell: I can't say that they don't understand it. I just think that if I was an unknown person, they would listen to it with different ears and their job is to not do that. From what I've heard, most of the positive reviews tend to be outside the country, like U.K. and Germany, where they wouldn't be necessarily as biased against an album that sounds like this. That's an indication that [the U.S. reviews] are based on something that has nothing to do with the music.

Metromix: A lot of the reviews opine that it sounds rushed and a bit forced.

Cornell: That's insanity to me. This was an album we spent six months on. If you listen to it and compare it to other music, this is musically pretty broad and adventurous. So someone's retarded to say that. There's no way anyone could listen to ["Scream"] in a vacuum and imagine that it was just something thrown together.

Metromix: Do you feel people automatically come in with a natural bias when an artist "reinvents" himself?

Cornell: Well, there's no question there's gonna be fans of hard rock bands who aren't gonna like ["Scream"]. It's just a natural thing. I made an album that isn't a guitar-based, heavy, hard rock album, so that's pretty simple math. I'm just a fan of a lot of different kinds of music and I want to be able to experiment with a lot of different stuff. I'm not running around trying to make the same album 25 times.

Metromix: What do you think SOUNDGARDEN-era Chris Cornell would think of "Scream"?

Cornell: He would love it. Absolutely. There are songs, vocal melodies, vocal performances and certain feels musically that I've been a fan of my whole life that I think are really authentically realized on this album.

Read the entire interview from Metromix.