Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil And Matt Cameron On Finishing Final Album With Chris Cornell: ‘It’s A Way To Post Tribute To Our Beloved Brother’

Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil and drummer Matt Cameron have opened up about the profound and “bittersweet” process of completing the band’s final album. In a new, extensive interview with The Seattle Times, the surviving members discussed the emotional weight of working with Chris Cornell‘s final vocal tracks, the “damaging” legal delays that stalled the project, and what the future might hold for the new music.

Cameron described the experience of building the album around Cornell‘s demo vocals, recorded before his 2017 death, as an overwhelming journey.

“It’s a massive emotional roller coaster. A lot of highs, a lot of lows,” Cameron said. “The highs are based on the fact that the music is seeing its light of day, it’s coming to life. Some of it feels like it could have been a new chapter in songwriting for the group, so that’s super bittersweet.”

He continued, pinpointing the most difficult part of the process: “But it’s been challenging to work on some of this music, soloing up Chris‘s vocals and hearing that beautiful voice come through the speakers all on its own.”

The project was famously stalled for years due to a protracted legal dispute with Chris Cornell‘s estate over access to the recordings. Kim Thayil explained that the long wait had a complex and conflicting effect on the band’s creative and emotional state.

“The delay in the process was damaging in some ways to the emotive nature of the experience,” Thayil admitted to the magazine. “Certainly, it’s great that we’re doing it now. I’m wondering — because you can’t help but wonder — how that emotive and creative journey might have been undertaken six, seven, eight years ago. You will never know that, and there’s something unfortunate (and) damaging about that.”

However, Thayil also noted that the passage of time has added to the album’s significance for the band.

“But there’s something also beneficial about that because we’re doing it now, and it’s beautiful,” he concluded. “It’s a way to post tribute to our beloved brother. All of it just has that much more weight emotionally and creatively, and we don’t take that lightly.”

When asked if fans might ever hear these new songs performed live, Cameron was cautiously optimistic.

“We haven’t really gotten there yet. We’re just trying to get the music together,” he said. “But I think there might be some situations where it would be really cool to do that. It’s just a matter of getting the right people together, and we’ve got some amazing people that we’ve been working with, some singers that have expressed interest. So, we’re really, really excited about what that could potentially look like.”

Last month, Cameron confirmed to “Gold Derby” that the album is “about… 70 percent finished.” He explained the vocals originate from demos recorded around “2015, ’16” and that the band is “just sort of building our tracks around those vocal parts,” describing the final album as “a really nice way to finish the creative chapter in Soundgarden.”