Another interview from Chris Cornell’s final press junket from April 2017 has surfaced after having not been previously publicized. In the interview with Manny The Movie Guy, which was promoting The Promise, Cornell described the horrendous acts in genocides against Armenians and Greeks. Alternative Nation transcribed Cornell’s comments.
Manny: Well, the song that you wrote is decidedly [a] ballad.
Cornell: Mmm-Hmm. You know it’s 1915 so I had to avoid more than I really could include. Like it had to be sort of out of time. So, I was trying to avoid certain musical influences that I otherwise might steer into normally, like The Beatles or something. The same instrumentally, I didn’t really want to include anything that wouldn’t have existed. Yet I wasn’t going to try and sing as though I’m from that era because I wouldn’t know how to do that.
So, it was kinda trying to write something out of time musically and then trying to capture a little bit of the emotion of the story and the fact that then and now people were forced to leave their homes and families separated, in the case of the Armenian Genocide or the Greeks for example. This was a horrendous, horrendous event and the way they did what they did was a protracted, evil, torturous thing, killing hundreds of thousands of people. It’s a story that needs to be repeated. Even if there wasn’t a denial it would still be a story that I think needs to be repeated because these things are happening right now.
