Who is Chris Cornell
Chris Cornell was a rock icon who thrived on contradictions. An innovator who resisted genre labels, he was nonetheless a chief architect of the 90s grunge movement. Frequently ranked as one of the best voices in music history, he successfully maintained his own unique identity over decades as a multi-Grammy award-winning musician and universally acclaimed singer, songwriter and lyricist.
Chris Cornell was born Christopher John Boyle on July 20 1964 in Seattle, Washington. He was the second youngest of six children, and was the son of Karen Cornell, an accountant, and Edward Boyle, a pharmacist. He was of mostly Irish, English, Scottish, and Norwegian ancestry, with many of his mother’s ancestors coming from Canada. His parents divorced when Chris was in his early teens, and Chris and his siblings changed their surnames from Boyle to his mother’s maiden name. Chris rebelled against his Catholic upbringing and was on the verge of being expelled from the parochial school he attended when his mother pulled him out. As an adolescent, he experimented with drugs and stealing. Among the things he stole were a collection of Beatles records from his neighbour’s basement which sparked an interest in songwriting. Though his parents had given him piano lessons from early on, Chris said his mother saved his life when she bought him a snare drum. A week later he bought himself an entire drum kit and thus began his forage into rock n roll.
Chris Cornell Quotes
1. And if you don’t believe the sun will rise, stand alone and greet the coming night in the last remaining light.
2. When you start your first band and it has an impact on the rest of the world you go through a lot with those guys and you become very protective of that legacy.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. My first favorite band that made music important to me was the Beatles. I was a little kid. I didn’t know who was singing what song or who wrote what song.
6. I don’t get in there and create a character. It’s more of a voice that I hear living inside the music.
7. 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.
8. Due to irresolvable personality conflicts as well as musical differences, I am permanently leaving the band Audioslave. I wish the other three members nothing but the best in all of their future endeavours.
9. 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.
10. 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.’
11. ‘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.
12. 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.
13. Most frontmen are not born hams like David Lee Roth. We’re more like Joey Ramone: awkward geeks who somehow find our place in the world on the stage.
14. My brother brought home ‘At San Quentin’ when I was about 7, and we played it over and over again.
15. It’s great when you play to an audience that knows the words to all your songs, and sings them back to you.
16. I feel like you’re not a real musician or entertainer if you can’t go into a room, pick up an instrument and entertain people.
17. 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.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. What formed me as a musician, a songwriter, the sound and personality of my band, a whole lot of that happened well before 1991.
21. I play Texas Hold’em on my Blackberry. I have amassed a fortune on that. I have almost 30 million dollars from playing. It is unreal.
22. I got in touch with the creative process between the age of 14 and 16, mainly because I was alone so much.
23. I never wrote music or arranged songs or lyrics when I was under the influence of anything but coffee. That’s not gone away.
24. 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.
25. There wasn’t a key moment when I knew I wanted to quit.
26. At the end of the day it’s the fans who make you who you are.
27. I think the concept of commercials, for example, I have had offers to do songs in different commercials, and it is not what I have liked.
28. I’m sure I could start a band tomorrow that would have different influences and would want to do something completely different than anything I’ve done.
29. When Soundgarden formed, we were post-punk – pretty quirky.
30. 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.
31.I’m not usually in a talkative mode.
32. I don’t really go mountain biking per se, like a proper sport.
33. 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.
34. I think back to my childhood, and I remember running around as a kid. We were all running around then. It wasn’t about getting into shape. It’s just what we did.
35. Radio and TV can still push a band, but things need to be shaken up. There is the Internet, but mostly what I see there is little kids on YouTube playing music.
36. Once you sit in front of people and start playing songs, it’s all on you. No matter what happens, it’s entirely your responsibility the entire time. I like that intensity.
If you’re an American kid, you can’t help but be influenced by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and the Rolling Stones because they’re always on the radio.
37. 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.
38. The focus on my wife and my children, it really helps me make sense of the music side of it somehow.
39. An acoustic show is all about you, and any little nuance or mistake is amplified.
40. I’ve had a long career and I want to continue to have a long career. The way to do that is not to go away.
41. I actually think to some degree that people are down for longer shows with an acoustic show.
42. 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.
43. I have a hard time narrowing things down to ten or 12 songs. If I walk off stage in anything less than two hours, it just feels strange. It feels early.
44. I was going to be a musician, no matter what it took. I supported myself with blue-collared jobs so I could write music and be in a band and play shows. I even got into an underground art scene. I was going to do whatever.
45. To a degree, rock fans like to live vicariously and they like that, music fans in general, but when indie music sort of came into prominence in the early ’90s, a lot of it was TV-driven, too, where if you saw the first Nirvana video, you’re looking at three guys that look like people you go to school with.
46. The freedom I have as a U.S. citizen is unparalleled. Despite the fact people may not like American passports, having that passport affords me more freedoms than any other passport could.
47. I think that one of the main privileges of what I do, which I am just starting to learn, is to have the ability to travel all over the world and experience different cultures.
48. There’s a lot of music that I don’t like.
49. If I’m going to go out to be a solo artist, it’s because I want to do something different without having to wait on someone else’s schedule or hobbies or be limited by other people’s prejudices. I’d be kind of stupid not to exercise that.
50. In the United States, workouts tend to focus on body image and how you look. For me, it’s really all about the brain.
51. Obviously, I want my kids to be happy, and I believe that they can be super successful at whatever they want to do, but don’t make the successful part more important than the process of doing it. Especially if it’s an artistic endeavor.
52. I think my children are definitely musically inclined, and they show it, and they’re exposed to a lot of it. And they’re their own people, and I think easily they could do something musical, or they could do something in acting or film or other types of the arts, and I would fully support it.
53. 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.
54. 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.
55. There was this moment when we made ‘Superunknown’: the Seattle music scene had suddenly ended up on an international stage with huge success.
56. The fans own the records and listen to them and love them. It becomes the soundtrack to some part of their lives, and we don’t control that. To me, that’s what’s exciting about what we do.
57. You sometimes get the feeling that people think getting back together after a hiatus to write and record a record is work, you know, arduous and unpleasant. Being able to write and record – that’s a privilege. I don’t forget the long days I spent working in a restaurant, when I wanted to be done so I could go home and work on a song.
58. I think Freddie Mercury is probably the best of all time in terms of a rock voice. There was a vulnerability to it, his technical ability was amazing, and so much of his personality would come out through his voice. I’m not even a guy to buy Queen records, really, and I still think he’s one of the best.
59. 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.
60. You can really walk around a song and completely, if it’s a good song, look at it from a lot of different angles. Johnny Cash with Rick Rubin illustrated that perfectly.
