Anyone even thinking about trying their hand at rock and roll vocals owes it to themselves to study under Chris Cornell. Throughout his career with Soundgarden and working his magic with Audioslave and in his solo career, Cornell paved the way for what rock and roll should sound like, taking the model of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and taking it to a new level. Before he had embraced his rock and roll dreams, Cornell admitted that one of the greatest voices he had ever heard was from another Seattle-based rock band,
Outside of the sounds of hard rock, Cornell always had a vast taste in music other than the radio rock staples. Becoming fascinated with the sounds of punk rock and art rock, many of Soundgarden’s greatest tunes involved the band taking every rock and roll trope and twisting it to serve their needs, either using strange time signatures or alternate tunings.
While the band was far from the most mainstream band during their inception, it was clear that Cornell was every bit the star that he had always dreamed of being. Compared to the sounds of rock and roll frontmen of ages past, Cornell wanted to embrace heavy rock when he started honing his vocals, going from behind the kit in the band’s first lineup to standing up front as Seattle’s token rock god.
Even though Seattle had been known for spitting out a handful of decent bands before the 1990s, like The Sonics, some of the greatest in their field often left Seattle to find their success elsewhere. Before becoming a rock god, Jimi Hendrix eventually moved from Seattle to England to be recognised for the first time, while artists like Quincy Jones left the Northwest to find his calling as one of the biggest producers alive.
Amid the transcendent rock and roll emerging from California, New York, and England, the Wilson sisters were honing their craft in the band Heart. Proudly representing their roots in Seattle, Ann and Nancy Wilson had an intrinsic love for all kinds of music that combined into the band’s signature sound, trying their hand at making hard rock staples with ‘Barracuda’ to creating Zeppelin-esque stompers like ‘Crazy on You’.
While Cornell had great respect for the music, it was Ann’s voice that struck him the first time he heard them, recalling at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “Having worshipped these women from afar and now close up, I have to say that Ann Wilson is a uniquely great vocal force of nature. I sat and watched Ann and Nancy play with acoustic guitars, and I have to tell you that it’s some of the best live singing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. She’s one of the few vocal models I look up to and say, ‘It’s possible to get better with age’”.
Cornell would even get the chance to watch how the Wilson sisters approached music before Soundgarden had broken through. Across Alice in Chains’ acoustic EP Sap, Cornell would lend his vocals to the track ‘Right Turn’, while Ann would lend her skills to the tracks ‘Brother’ and ‘Am I Inside’. Even though Cornell may have been able to be the greatest rock and roll frontman whenever he took to the stage, he knew that Ann was the towering rock and roll tour de force that every rock vocalist could take a few cues from.
