Chris Cornell Carries On

It's scary to think about, but Chris Cornell is 42 years old. The guy who wrote part of the soundtrack to many a grunge kid's adolescence is hitting middle age, which means his acolytes who grew up slamdancing to "Rusty Cage" and swaying jadedly to "Black Hole Sun" aren't far behind.

You'd expect a guy his age to be feeling his years, but the ex-Soundgarden and, more recently ex-Audioslave frontman is coping with it better than thirty-somethings who are just now realizing that Soundgarden broke up a decade ago.

A large factor of Cornell's newfound zen is his second solo album, Carry On. Fans expecting something resembling his hard-rockin' past will be forced to look elsewhere as the disc is even more sparse than his 1999 solo debut, Euphoria Morning. According to Cornell, it's the record he's been trying to make for the last 20 years.

"I've always been striving for the writing process to be great and really enjoyable, not like a struggle so you have a great outcome. The process of songwriting, lyric writing, the whole thing, doing it alone has been varied over the years for me. For Euphoria Morning, it was pretty miserable for me. I was a miserable guy, I was alone all the time, I was in this dark warehouse writing these songs. With Soundgarden, they were always extremely difficult.

"On this record, this was really the first time, where the whole time I was having a great time doing it, not worrying about it. Because, hey, if I spend a day or two on a song, and at the end I don't like it and it isn't the best song I ever did, so what? This record, clearly more than any other record, kind of finally yielded those years of effort trying to figure out how to do that."

With the completion of Carry On also came the realization that the singer was, in fact, one of the elder statesmen of modern rock.

"There's some sort of nervous guy inside me saying, 'It's over now, nobody's gonna like you anymore, nobody's gonna like this record, nobody's gonna like this song,'" he admits. "People are fickle and the lifespan of someone who does what I do is pretty short.

"Being a realist, I figured that would be the case. Lately, it's been starting to dawn on me that I've been doing this for 20 years. People are still interested in the songs I'm making and what I'm going to make. People still come to see me play. It probably isn't going to go away.

"There are things that come up, where different articles and polls and people saying things make me start realizing that I can't be a new guy my whole life. I'm becoming the guy that's been around and slowly but surely am becoming one of those guys who people just accept. That's something I've seen happen to other people, where they just don't go away and if they don't, one day there becomes a trust. It's like you just become accepted as a fixture or pillar almost. Then it becomes my job to screw around with that."

It would be easy for Cornell to play the troubled artist card, given his recent bouts with alcoholism and problems with his ex-wife, but he maintains a positive outlook through it all. It would appear The Corn is in a better place than he's ever been.

"I'm not doing anything to myself anymore that could cause a problem," he states proudly. "Everything I'm doing in my life, every aspect of my family that supports me, sort of all supports the continuation of me doing this.

"My attitude has always been that I'm a musician and songwriter. I play music first and whatever the outcome of any particular project is kind of out of my hands. And whatever the lifespan that project has is out of my hands, so I don't think about it. I'm just thinking about, 'What's the next song I'm gonna write? What's the next show I'm gonna play?' That kind of thing. I haven't been looking back much."