Like his grunge comrade Kurt Cobain, Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell had an ambiguous relationship with his most celebrated material. Known for his perfectionism, the songwriter and frontman pushed himself to the limits of his ability repeatedly, frequently rejecting recordings that didn’t meet his expectations. Interestingly, one of the songs he had the most trouble with was the phenomenally successful 1994 single ‘Black Hole Sun’.
“I was driving home at like 4am when I wrote that song,” Cornell told Howard Stern back in 2007. “I tried to keep it revolving so I wouldn’t forget, went inside, kind of whistled it into a tape recorder – which I never listened back to, but just in case I forgot it.” With the song already fully formed, all Cornell needed to do was write out the lyrics and record an initial demo. “The next day, I brought it into the real world, assigning a couple of key changes in the verse to make the melodies more interesting,” he told Uncut [via Songfacts]. “Then I wrote the lyrics, and that was similar, a stream of consciousness based on the feeling I got from the chorus and title.”
Cornell had surprised even himself. In the studio, however, things became more complicated. Chris’s initial demo had benefitted from a certain immediacy which he found difficult to replicate in the formalised environment. That’s not to say Cornell ever hated ‘Black Hole Sun’. According to producer Michael Beinhorn, the idea that Cornell resented the track is a bit of a myth: “I think he recognised the kind of power that that song had,” he said. “I think Chris was a lot more aware of the effect of the music that he wrote. He had a good stockpile of songs, and he knew that that song was, for lack of a better word, powerful currency.”
Obviously, that made getting the recording right all the more important, something Cornell struggled with: According to Beinhorn, it was the “one song on the record” he did “two passes” on, recording it over two days. “He did his vocal take for it,” the producer told Daniel Sarkissian, “and he came back and looked at me and said, ‘it sucks, we’ve gotta do it all over.’ I’ve never seen a vocalist do that before, where they listen back to their own work and are like, ‘it’s not good enough’. I was pretty impressed by that.”
“He knew that he had to do it again,” Beinhorn continued. “He felt very strongly that it wasn’t good enough, so he put 110% into that one, and he was well aware, at least that was my experience, that [Black Hole Sun’] was the showpiece of the album. I mean, the record was great, and it would’ve been great without it, but the fact that that was there, that kind of sealed the deal on it.”
You can revisit one of Cornell’s final acoustic renditions of ‘Black Hole Sun’ below.
