Soundgarden reunited for one final show in January 2019 at the Chris Cornell ‘I Am The Highway’ memorial show, with Taylor Momsen, Taylor Hawkins, and others replacing Chris Cornell for one night. Kim Thayil discussed playing the show in a new interview with Kerrang.
“The best thing about it was playing those songs again with Matt [Cameron, drums] and Ben [Shepherd, bass], and the next best thing was having our friends and guests join us. The rest was a little bit uncomfortable. It was sort of a clusterfuck. It was picking at an open wound, emotionally, and nobody was that thrilled to do it.
We were thrilled to play the songs for our audience and to play with each other on stage. The takeaway was the band being together with our family, crew, and friends. To see that family together again was love. Everyone was happy and teary-eyed.
It was the Soundgarden family together, doing what Soundgarden does, and honoring and missing our beloved, departed member. That was important. The rest of it – the celebrity nature, promotion, and focus, was bullshit. And we knew it was bullshit going into it. We did it for each other, to support Chris’ legacy. There was something awkward and un-intimate about it. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around it, but I’m glad we did it for our friends and family.”
Taylor Momsen recruited Kim Thayil and Matt Cameron to play on The Pretty Reckless’ new album Death By Rock And Roll. She recently celebrated Thayil’s 60th birthday by saying, “#happybirthday to the one and only #GUITARGOD that is #KimThayil shred a piece of cake for me dude!! ❤️❤️❤️ #soundgarden #nudedragons.”
Thayil has also expressed an interesting in continuing to play with his surviving Soundgarden bandmates, saying, “We will definitely find our feet, move forward, and do some original stuff again. Hopefully, I’ll do stuff with Matt and Ben.”
He stated about Soundgarden’s unreleased new album, which involves a lawsuit where Soundgarden recently called for a jury trial against Vicky Cornell, that he hopes to release it.
“When Soundgarden ended, prior to that last tour, we had spent a year writing, on-and-off in-between Pearl Jam gigs, and Chris’ solo tours. We had written and demoed over half a dozen complete songs, and we probably had another half a dozen in development.
“We could probably finish them – it would require me, Matt and Ben to get the vocal performances that Chris recorded and play along with it to finish the songs. We can do that and sometime in the future, we will do that.
At this point, we don’t have possession of those work tapes. There’s a lot of loose ends there, stuff that I would love to do with Matt and Ben. There’s some stuff I’d like to find out if Chris had written lyrics for. We don’t know yet.”
