Image Courtesy of Press Here PublicityFor his upcoming album, Higher Truth, Chris Cornell wanted a more “intimate” sound -- so he didn’t hire a band.
Instead, he tells Rolling Stone that he and producer Brendan O’Brien played the vast majority of the instruments on the album themselves. Cornell previously worked with O’Brien on Soundgarden’s Superunknown and Audioslave’s Revelations.
"I wanted the album to be intimate and small and so I didn't want to hire a band," Cornell says. "I also know how Brendan works. He's very focused and very quick and he always makes the right choices. Some of it was a leap of faith for me, but everything I wanted to get out of our relationship I got and none of the fears I had came to fruition at all. I feel like I got pretty lucky."
Pearl Jam drummer Matt Chamberlain, pianist Patrick Wong and violinist Anne-Marie Simpson also contributed to select tracks.
The album took a decidedly more stripped-down direction than his last solo studio album, the electronic-inspired and ill-received Scream. Many of the tracks on Higher Truth have an undercurrent of sadness, which Cornell says is not unusual for him.
"Often times, especially in the context of an acoustic song, I'm motivated to write by some amount of melancholy,” he says. “I listened to a lot of other acoustic albums going into this. There's a sort of chipper, up-tempo nature to a lot of records, like with Jack Johnson, where it sounds great and there's an intimacy to it. But I don't have that in me."
The album arrives September 18, and the day before it's released, Cornell will kick off his solo tour in Phoenix, Arizona. But don’t think all this solo work means the end of Soundgarden.
"We're already working on new material for an album," he says of the band. "And then I've got several other irons in the fire and things going that I won't mention now. There's a lot of things coming in addition to Higher Truth, as well as a new Soundgarden album."
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