Chris Cornell screams back

(Credit: Randall Slavin)

Over the past 25 years, Chris Cornell has continually redefined himself as an artist. His first band, Soundgarden, formed in 1984 and went on to become one of the most successful rock bands of the ‘90s before their mutual breakup in 1997. Since then, Cornell has released three albums with hard rock group Audioslave (with members of Rage Against the Machine), a pair of solo albums showcasing his mellower, more melodic side, and is credited as co-writer on American Idol winner David Cook’s first single “Light On.”

But nothing in the singer’s diverse career could have prepared fans for “Scream,” his third and most audacious album to date. To switch things up, Cornell paired up with hip-hop and pop über-producer Timbaland to create an album that’s more for the clubs than the mosh pit.

“I was looking for a remixer to do an even more twisted version of ‘Billie Jean’ [the Michael Jackson song Cornell covered on 2007’s 'Carry On'] and Timbaland’s name was one of the first to come up,” says Cornell from Los Angeles. While the remixes never materialized, an unlikely sonic bond was formed, and the duo quickly went into the studio to begin work on the recently released album.

Cornell spoke to Metromix while preparing for his upcoming U.S. tour about reaction to the album and the challenges of reinventing himself and his sound.

The early reviews of “Scream” have been pretty scathing. Have you read any of them?
I haven’t really read any, but I hear about them here and there. But I know what the record is. Depending on what album [I make], I can have a hard or easy time with objectivity. With “Scream,” I have a really easy time because it’s so different. And I know it’s a great album. I also know it’s an easy target. I go online and the negative versus positive comments about “Scream” are age-specific: old people don’t like it and young people love it, or young people aren’t angry at it at least.

Do you think it’s a question of critics not understanding the album?
I can’t say that they don’t understand it. I just think that if I was an unknown person, they would listen to it with different ears and their job is to not do that. From what I’ve heard, most of the positive reviews tend to be outside the country, like U.K. and Germany, where they wouldn’t be necessarily as biased against an album that sounds like this. That’s an indication that [the U.S. reviews] are based on something that has nothing to do with the music.

A lot of the reviews opine that it sounds rushed and a bit forced.
That’s insanity to me. This was an album we spent six months on. If you listen to it and compare it to other music, this is musically pretty broad and adventurous. So someone’s retarded to say that. There’s no way anyone could listen to [“Scream”] in a vacuum and imagine that it was just something thrown together.

Especially compared to Soundgarden, “Scream” seems to be more aimed at a commercial, mainstream market.
No, definitely not. [Laughs] I don’t know if someone can show me where the commercial mainstream song is on it.

Really? Timbaland’s beats on the album seem pretty geared toward the club, no?
Well, he definitely is a producer of pop music, no question about it. But we didn’t approach my album that way. If anything, we approached it the opposite way, where it ended up being this hour of continuous music based on that idea.

You recently talked about the excitement of creating music that wouldn’t be “unanimously loved.” Was this the impetus for the new album?
I don’t look at it as being a grandiose statement that I’m making to the public. To me, trying something different seemed perfectly normal and natural. I wasn’t having any sort of creative crisis. It just seemed like a fun, cool thing to do. And it also seemed like a challenge. I definitely get something out of putting myself in situations where I’m not King Shit and everybody else is just running around trying to make me comfortable.

Do you feel people automatically come in with a natural bias when an artist “reinvents” himself?
Well, there’s no question there’s gonna be fans of hard rock bands who aren’t gonna like [“Scream”]. It’s just a natural thing. I made an album that isn’t a guitar-based, heavy, hard rock album, so that’s pretty simple math. I’m just a fan of a lot of different kinds of music and I want to be able to experiment with a lot of different stuff. I’m not running around trying to make the same album 25 times.

What do you think Soundgarden-era Chris Cornell would think of “Scream”?
He would love it. Absolutely. There are songs, vocal melodies, vocal performances and certain feels musically that I’ve been a fan of my whole life that I think are really authentically realized on this album.