Chris Cornell discussed Temple of the Dog and Soundgarden in a new interview with Mike McCready on Pearl Jam Radio. McCready asked Cornell about Soundgarden’s new album, and Cornell responded, “Well, we’ve been in the middle of it for awhile.” He added, very sarcastically, “Really, you guys, and Matt, sort of agreed to come out here and do this Temple tour, sort of slowing down the whole Soundgarden process. So, Soundgarden fans, it’s really mostly Mike’s fault.”
McCready quipped, “Sorry guys, don’t come after me.”
Cornell added, “I was about to work on a Soundgarden song, before you came in here with these microphones, and used my coffee machine.”
Cornell also discussed the Temple of the Dog tour.
“It’s amazing that there’s an audience out there that is so motivated and into seeing it, and that this album over this many years has maintained a special place in a lot of people’s hearts.”
“Being able to play all these songs with you guys after what was maybe a period of a couple weeks making it, and then just sort of going our separate directions and never really having the opportunity to do it like we’re doing it now, that’s pretty great.”
“Finding this sort of live metamorphosis of the songs, which to me is an important thing, to me that’s one of the exciting important things about a song. Why it’s fortunate that we get to do what we do, writing songs. It’s this thing you invent, and really the infancy to me is not so much the demo or the band arranging it in a room getting ready to record it. The infancy is really the finished recorded master version of the song that everyone gets to hear. It may have evolved a little bit, it maybe has been in embryo form, and that’s maybe the version you’re ready for, but once you start playing them live, they really evolve into something else completely, and can find their way back to something closer to the original thing.
But I think that’s something that these songs never got the opportunity to do, and it’s fun to be able to do that, and find little corners of each songs, that in my gut feels like there’s more in here, there’s more to this. We kind of raced through that record, it’s great as it stands, but there’s more in there that we get to discover now, which is cool, and we get to do it in front of everybody.”
