Temple of the Dog are reissuing their debut album, but frontman Chris Cornell doesn’t think the reissue crazy culture is necessarily a good thing for music. He discussed this in a new Guardian interview.
“Companies figured out that the easiest way to make money was to reissue records that the accounting department had paid for years ago and already made a profit,” he said. “Every band is fucking doing anniversary projects. It’s the punctuation mark at the end of the record industry.”
He said when Temple of the Dog made their first album, it was done for the right reasons.
“We made the album in a really short period of time with almost no money, and without rehearsing,” Cornell said. “It worked because our hearts were in the right place and there were no expectations.”
In fact, Cornell says that when they delivered the Temple album to A&M Records, “they seemed to treat it as though it was a vanity project for me.”
Watch full video of Temple of the Dog’s show earlier this week at the Forum in Los Angeles below.
Chris Cornell seemed hopeful for Temple of the Dog’s reunion following the conclusion of their fall 2016 reunion tour in a new Guardian interview.
“The hard work, of getting into a room and learning to deliver these songs live, we’ve already done,” said Cornell. “That makes the idea of adding to that in the future a lot more possible.”
He later added, “The evolved, live versions of the songs hadn’t existed until now,” said Cornell. “I’m finding aspects to the song I never knew existed. That’s the miracle of music. No one can reinterpret a Picasso but a song can be remixed and covered and interpreted in an infinite number of ways. It’s a living thing.”
Cornell also discussed Andrew Wood’s death, and his difficulty with dealing with loss.
“I’ve always had really difficult time with loss,” he said. “I didn’t deal well with Andy’s death. After he died, numerous times I’d be driving and I would look out the window and I thought I saw him. It would take me five minutes to update to the moment and realize, ‘no, he’s actually dead.’ This tour, in a sense, is the dealing. It’s facing the reality.”
