SOUNDGARDEN Guitarist Talks To ROLLING STONE About Band's Future Plans

Greg Prato of RollingStone.com recently conducted an interview with guitarist Kim Thayil of reunited grunge legends SOUNDGARDEN. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

RollingStone.com: Why was there not a full tour after Lollapalooza last year?

Kim: The thing that got in the way of that the most, Matt [Cameron] had PEARL JAM obligations and Chris [Cornell] had some solo obligations. It took a lot to catch up on 13 years. You have to learn a whole bunch of songs to get ready for a few shows, and of course, putting out [compilation album] "Telephantasm". And the "Black Rain" video. I was representing the band, supervising "Telephantasm" from artwork to track listing. So that was a big project. Then starting on mixing, mastering, and designing the artwork and packaging for the "Live On I5" album. And Ben [Shepherd] wrote and recorded a solo record in that period too, that hasn't been released. It was a very busy year for us.

RollingStone.com: Is there any talk of SOUNDGARDEN doing a full tour soon, as opposed to just one-off dates?

Kim: I think we're definitely interested in playing live again. It would be more satisfying if we were to get that momentum rolling. It's never ultimately satisfying to play a one-off show here and there, because you don't have the subsequent nights to redeem yourself if there is something that you feel went unsaid or something you feel went unexpressed or something you could do better. And the cool thing about being on a tour is there is always the next night. You have great nights, you have nights that aren't so great. And when you're on tour, you can build on that momentum.

RollingStone.com: Any chance of a full summer tour?

Kim: I think Matt's got some PEARL JAM commitments coming up, but we're always talking about stuff. There's always ideas. I don't mean to be vague, but we're always talking to each other and jamming with each other, and I think it's probably likely that we'll be playing live. And I think we would be happier to do that in tour form than just to do it as one-offs. If nothing's on paper or in stone, I wouldn't want to disappoint people – other than we want to do that and we're definitely talking about that.

RollingStone.com: New material?

Kim: We are jamming. Just getting to re-learn and re-love each other in a creative fashion. And it's wonderful, it's been going great. Everyone's happy, and there are a lot of ideas being thrown around. We do apologize that we haven't been able to share the past few months with our fans, because it really has been a couple of months of a lot of creative insight and sharing amongst the band members. Although there are many of our fans that would love us to be entertainers, we love that too, but the one element that we hadn't fully re-explored and re-established is the creative element. The creative partnership is certainly the one we wanted to set aside time to enjoy, and that's what we've been doing over the past few months. And I really would like the fans to know that.

Read the entire interview from RollingStone.com.