Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell discussed his new song “The Promise” in a new Rolling Stone article. In the article, he had high praise for Metallica, mentioning them in the same breath as the Beatles.
“I wasn’t trying to record a song that sounded like it was from 1915, but I didn’t want there to be obvious modern references because obviously at the time there was no such thing as the Beatles or Metallica or everything that is my reference for musical ideas,” he says. “So the orchestra works just because that did exist and it can be a little bit out of time, so I was swimming in those waters of ambiguity.”
He also discussed genocides.
“I married into a Greek family, and my wife’s grandparents were affected by the same genocide at the same time, since it was part of the same Ottoman Empire policy. So I saw the nearness to it. And one of the producers is a good friend of mine, and he’s Armenian and we talked about it for a long time. It affected his generation and you can see it echoing through the generations. … I think we all have a responsibility to recognize the warning signs that lead to this.”
He later said, “You can see it now in Syria, where you have one regime that is trying to deny any [killing] is happening and you have ISIS on the other side who is targeting a different group and advertising it.”
