CHRIS CORNELL Says SOUNDGARDEN Is 'More Relaxed' During Recording Process For New Album

Cathy A. Campagna of The Aquarian Weekly recently conducted an interview SOUNDGARDEN/ex-AUDIOSLAVE singer Chris Cornell. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

The Aquarian Weekly: SOUNDGARDEN is writing new songs now. What have you noticed to be different about that whole process now with the passing of time? Have the perimeters of the band widened even more?

Cornell: The one thing that I have noticed that is different is that we are a lot more relaxed. I think we were always relaxed, but more so than ever. And the main reason for that is that we don't have a release date. We don't have a calendar with an "X" on it that says you have to be done by this day. We don't have that, we are just recording, and it will be done when we decided it's done. That was the act that was always chasing after us, was that we were this indie band that did whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, then we became part of this bigger business. Then that sort of began the cyclical album, tour thing and there were always dates proposed and tours happening. When you go in to start writing for example, and someone is slating that it will be released at a specific time — that just doesn't make any sense. With SOUNDGARDEN especially, it didn't work well with us, and that was a big part of why we stopped being SOUNDGARDEN. Now that is gone. I always speculate a lot that that was the biggest factor, and now that I see that it's not there, I see that is the biggest factor. We have been working in the same way we always did in terms of effort, showing up and being excited creatively. We have done a lot in a pretty short period of time without the constraints of a schedule, without somebody plotting out tours for us, and that we would have to go whether we feel like we are finished with the record or not.

The Aquarian Weekly: I had interviewed you once before when AUDIOSLAVE just came out, and you said about your time in SOUNDGARDEN that you were a bit of a control freak, and would sometimes stonewall producers.

Cornell: Uh-huh.

The Aquarian Weekly: Has that tendency dissipated over time?

Cornell: Yeah, I think we are exactly the same way. Like right now, we are working with Adam Kasper, who we worked with on "Down On The Upside", and it's more of including someone into our process that fits in comfortably with us and has ideas and works like another band member, like an extension of the band. As opposed to someone who comes in with the role of producer and starts telling us how to be us. That's why we stonewalled producers; as soon as somebody told us anything about a song arrangement that we didn't like we would just shut it down. Maybe be they could have come up with good ideas later in the process, but we weren't interested. And a lot of that had to do with how familiar someone is with what you do and how quick they get it. And we just didn't have that experience that often. We certainly had it with Adam, we had it with Jack Endino in the beginning of our recording period. We had it with Stuart XX who was the first person who recorded us where it sounded like us, but then we had a lot of people we didn't know that well come in, and it just didn't feel like they were going to capture us better than us. So they would just become engineers as far as we were concerned.

Read the entire interview from The Aquarian Weekly.