Pearl Jam Radio recently broadcast a Singles 25th Anniversary special, and it featured newly released posthumous commentary from Chris Cornell discussing his work on the film’s soundtrack. This is likely to be one of the last new interview snippets we get from the late Soundgarden frontman. Alternative Nation transcribed Cornell’s comments.
“Jeff [Ament] had done some graphic design for the film set, and one of the ideas was sort of a take on what Andy Wood did, when we were living together he did a bunch of four tracks. They weren’t really demos, they were him having fun with songs. We both did it, and we would share them back and forth. He made kind of a solo album out of it, where he just dubbed his own cassettes, and it was just mixes off of a cassette four track. He put it inside Fall Out Records, that was the indie record store in the neighborhood, for sale, and I think Cameron [Crowe] was inspired by that to have his main character in the film do the same thing.
The cassette packaging that Jeff did was just kind of identical to what everyone else was doing. It was a Kinkos copy xerox on colored paper with a silhouette of the character and some song titles on it. So it said ‘Poncier’ on the front, and then song titles, and Jeff just made up the song titles. One of those titles was ‘Spoonman,’ one of those titles was ‘Seasons,’ there was one called ‘Flutter Girl.’
They were all really inspiring to me. I remember seeing it and having this idea that went into my head, wouldn’t it be great to take that home, and actually write those songs based on those titles. On a four track, the way that it’s supposed to be, then mix them down, put them in the cassette, and have somebody sort of direct Cameron to discover it on the set.
So I did that, and I spent a couple hours on each song, it wasn’t long, I kind of rushed through it. It was a really fun experience, because I learned that writing songs just for the fun of it, for no particular destination, can create songs that have a life that lives on and on and on. I just thought it would be a fun thing to do, so I did that, and then directed someone to get Cameron to find it. I think he was inspired by it, and he was really gracious about it, and took pieces of some of it, most memorably ‘Seasons,’ and wanted that to be part of the soundtrack to his film.”