Chris Cornell
And if you don't believe the sun will rise, stand alone and greet the coming night in the last remaining light.Collection: Alone
In spite of my lack of education, I didn't lack direction.Collection: Education
The sense of anger I had when I was younger is something I thought would never go away. Over time, it's something you get almost bored with.Collection: Anger
I came from a childhood where I spent a lot of time alone and a lot of time just living with my imagination, and a certain amount of the adult world was kind of alienating.Collection: Alone
Hip-hop kind of absorbed rock in terms of the attitude and the whole point of why rock was important music. Young people felt like rock music was theirs, from Elvis to the Beatles to the Ramones to Nirvana. This was theirs; it wasn't their parents'. I think hip-hop became the musical style that embraces that mentality.Collection: Attitude
There's sadness to anyone that dies before their time, and specifically ones that seem to affect people in a positive way. It doesn't matter if it's Whitney Houston or a nameless, faceless person on the street. That's just as big of a tragedy for me.Collection: Positive
I wasn't good in school. I didn't do sports. I sat in the bedroom and listened to records. Because the Beatles did whatever they wanted to, I took that as a kid and said, 'That's what rock is.'Collection: Sports
'Black Hole Sun' was written in a car when I was driving home from the studio one night. Pretty much everything that you hear was written in my head.Collection: Home
'The Beatles' did whatever they wanted. They were a collection of influences adapted to songs they wanted to write. George Harrison was instrumental in bringing in Indian music. Paul McCartney was a huge Little Richard fan. John Lennon was into minimalist aggressive rock.Collection: Music
What's important is to get into shape and then not to have to worry about it. I don't want to get on stage and not being able to do something. Not being physically fit doesn't work for me.Collection: Fitness
I had kind of a mean piano teacher. I went to Catholic school, so it was like the typical thing you would imagine - a little kid with a white-haired teacher frowning at the fact that I didn't practice.Collection: Teacher
I would look at older blues musicians who just keep going into their seventies. They keep doing it until they drop dead. And I've always felt like that's what I want to do. I've felt that since the day I was able to start playing music for a living. I don't see the point of thinking about retiring because it's not work to begin with.
The reason there's no modern-day Shakespeare is because he didn't have anything to do except sit in a room with a candle and think.
One of the main dilemmas that's pretty common to a lot of people who are getting older is the idea that maybe there's a finish line and that maybe there's a time in your life when you start to slow down and stop and smell the roses and just kind of settle into what will be a comfortable period in your life.
I'm not a lyric writer to make statements. What I enjoy doing is making paintings with lyrics, creating colorful images. I think that's more what entertainment and music should be.
A true musician, like Johnny Cash, should be able to walk into a room with nothing but an instrument and capture people's attention for two hours.
Some of the most brilliant things that someone might do could happen in three minutes because it's something that just occurs to them. And then, there's the example of really chipping away at something to create something great. I don't believe that one is more reliable than the other.
Music is supposed to be inspired.
There's something about losing friends, particularly young people, where it's not something that you get over. I don't believe there's a healing process.
I felt very proud to be part of a music scene that was changing the face of commercial music and rock music internationally, but I also felt like it was necessary for Soundgarden - as it was for all of these Seattle bands - to prove that we deserve to be on an international stage, and we weren't just part of a fad that was based on geography.
There wasn't a key moment when I knew I wanted to quit.
There's this existential argument that comes in, at some point, when you're over-thinking the songwriting process. There's no guarantee that the more time you spend or the more you concentrate on certain aspects that that's going to produce a better result, especially in the arts.
Stone Temple Pilots, Bush, and Silverchair are taking the simplest elements of Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam and melding them into one homogenous thing.
At the end of the day it's the fans who make you who you are.
In the United States, workouts tend to focus on body image and how you look. For me, it's really all about the brain.
There was a period in my life where most of my musical career was spent in a band that was very aggressive, and there was sort of a wall of volume all the time.
To me, music shouldn't be ego-driven. When you go out on stage and play songs, it is. But when you're sitting in a room, writing songs, it's a completely different process. It's a completely different place. It's a creative place, a musical place. It has nothing to do with who likes what.
I think there needs to be a global focus on people taking care of people.
Children should always feel like the adults are living in this world to nurture them, to take care of them, to protect them from any bad thing that might come.
It's good for me to be involved in different things.
I had to teach myself to let go of the conventional rock way of playing guitar and singing. Some things you wouldn't expect to work, did and some things won't ever work.
I'm not usually in a talkative mode.
I can go from one extreme to another, from playing at the Sydney Opera House on the Songbook tour to shows with Soundgarden at Voodoo Fest, all in a week.
There was this moment when we made 'Superunknown': the Seattle music scene had suddenly ended up on an international stage with huge success.
I think the Beatles is one band that, if I'm working on a song arrangement or if I have some idea for a song, and there's a little bit of a Beatles quality to it, I never avoid that. I always will steer into it.
I've always liked depressing music because a lot of times, listening to it when you're down can actually make you feel less depressed. Also, even though a person may have problems with depression, sometimes you can actually be kind of comfortable in that space because you know how to operate within it.
I don't listen to Beyonce or Jennifer Hudson records.
Rock never meant the same thing to everyone, but when I was growing up in the late seventies, everyone could identify the five, ten bands that formed the center.
That's the miracle of music. No one can reinterpret a Picasso, but a song can be remixed and covered and interpreted in an infinite number of ways. It's a living thing.
What do you think Jesus would twitter, 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone' or 'Has anyone seen Judas? He was here a minute ago.'
I think it's important for fans to know that but if I'm doing something that inspires me musically then I think it will inspire someone else too.
I got a GED based on Catholic school seventh-grade education, really. I didn't make it that far.
I've seen a lot of Pearl Jam shows, and the only reaction I've ever seen is the audience being completely supportive and loving every moment.
I never look back, ever. I'm always looking ahead, working on the next thing.
Companies figured out that the easiest way to make money was to reissue records that the accounting department had paid for years ago and already made a profit.
Seattle very much benefited from this geography where it was a town nobody had really heard of in terms of a music scene. So we had that factor of being a new discovery.
I've always felt like there's a certain amount of doing what I do, and performing and making records and doing interviews and photo shoots and that, that are kind of a necessary evil of getting my music to people's ears to hear. Over the years, I've just become more tolerant of that.
'Spoonman' wasn't written for any album. It was just written for fun.
I just kind of went into the blue-collar workforce at a really young age and discovered music, in terms of being a musician, around the same time. The good news is, I was probably 17 when I knew that's what I was going to do with the rest of my life, no matter what that meant.
Soundgarden was incredibly democratic, and I was really proud of that. I felt like we got along better than most bands we toured with and most people we knew. And at the same time, when you're that democratic and concerned with each other's opinions, you're always concerned with what the other people think.