Chris Cornell On Why Temple of the Dog Can ‘Claim Ownership’ To Mother Love Bone Songs

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Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell discussed Temple of the Dog, Mother Love Bone, and Andrew Wood in a recent interview with Full Metal Jackie. Alternative Nation transcribed his comments.

“I think in a lot of ways we are sort of experiencing it now. I think songs and music have a way of just taking on their own life. Once people are out there listening to them, especially nowadays when it can be shared so easily, you’re not in control of what the perception of what that song is, or where it goes, or what it does, or what people think of it. One of the components of an album like Temple of the Dog, if there is one, besides Temple of the Dog, is I think it does have healing properties, because that was the point of it, that was part of the conception of it.

Certain songs have become the soundtrack to different individuals lives when they’re going through very difficult things. That’s not something that was planned on, that’s not an album that was engineered for it, but that becomes this bonus, that when you hear those stories after the fact, you feel very proud of what you’ve done, and very thankful, and feel very lucky that I’m able to do this for a living, that I can sit down and I have the time because I can do it for a living, to write a song that might actually help someone that I’ll never meet, through the loss of a loved one for example. That’s an amazingly privileged situation to be in. I think Temple has done that in a very unusually big way.”

“It’s been really amazing. To me, one of the unexpected things I supposed is I knew, we spoke about it, that we’d do a couple Mother Love Bone songs. But I think we’re doing 5, and that again is another album like Temple of the Dog that is among the best rock records of its period, that did not have a band to go out and support it. Therefore, not so many people heard about it, and it’s never been toured before, it’s never really been played like that. So that’s been pretty exciting too, not just to play Temple of the Dog, but to be able to play these other songs as well, and in a sense of a band we can claim ownership of them, while doing something on a level that we’ve never imagined from the beginning, which is to draw attention to Andy’s legacy, and his brilliance, and the music that he left behind.

There’s not a lot of it, but there’s enough that people can listen to it and get a sense of who this guy was and how talented he was. That was I think the thing that hit me personally the hardest, when this guy died of 24, we all thought of him as amongst absolutely the most talented of anyone in the scene. For him to go away and no one to ever be able to discover that, that seemed almost harder than anything else. So to be able to play all of Temple, and all of these Mother Love Bone songs in the Forum, we even played a recording of him doing a spiel between one of the songs, of several versions he did, so people are hearing his voice, bringing that out there, and seeing so many people out there listening to it, that is super fulfilling for me.”