ALICE IN CHAINS guitarist Jerry Cantrell recently sat down with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s YouTube channel for a feature that challenged him with something he freely admits he’s terrible at: choosing just three SOUNDGARDEN songs that define the band. The result is a heartfelt tribute not only to the group’s legacy, but to his late friend Chris Cornell.
Cantrell, who came up alongside SOUNDGARDEN in the same influential Seattle scene, immediately pushed back on the idea that the band could be summed up in only a handful of tracks. “I hate this because I hate having to pare it down to three songs that define SOUNDGARDEN, because I think SOUNDGARDEN‘s kind of undefinable,” he said. He went on to explain just how difficult it is for him to identify favorites. It’s always hard for me to do favorites. I’m really bad at this, because I like it all. I really do. I mean, if it was a band that was like a one- or two-hit wonder, it’d be a lot easier. But SOUNDGARDEN wrote so many great f**king songs.
Reflecting on the band’s catalog — six studio albums that helped shape an entire era of rock — Cantrell made it clear that he views the body of work as consistently exceptional. “The records that they made — what? Six records? — they were f**king brilliant. So to pick like one of those out and say one is better than the other, or even that one means more to me than another is pretty tough because I think it’s all really superb. It’s all pretty stellar,” he said.
“I was going through things today and thinking of things all the way from ‘Hunted Down’ and ‘Flower’ to ‘Limo Wreck’ and ‘Gun’ and ‘Burden In My Hand’ and ‘Superunknown’, ‘Rusty Cage’, ‘Black Hole Sun’ — I mean, I could go on and on. I don’t think they ever did anything bad,” Jerry continued. “I don’t think they ever put a bad record out, and I don’t think they ever wrote a bad song. And as far as the lyrical approach, it’s all poetry, man. It’s all super-high-quality stuff. And so to pick something out — ‘The Day I Tried To Live’, I think maybe that song, it’s pretty… I mean, the hair just went up on the back of my neck just mentioning that song. There’s one that gets me in the short and curlies.”
SOUNDGARDEN’s lasting impact was celebrated once again during their induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame on November 8 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. Surviving members Matt Cameron, Kim Thayil, Ben Shepherd, and original bassist Hiro Yamamoto performed alongside PEARL JAM’s Mike McCready and THE PRETTY RECKLESS singer Taylor Momsen on “Rusty Cage”. Brandi Carlile and Jerry Cantrell then took the stage for a stirring rendition of “Black Hole Sun”.
The evening closed on a touching note when Chris Cornell’s daughter Toni joined HEART’s Nancy Wilson for an acoustic performance of “Fell On Black Days”, underscoring the emotional depth and legacy of SOUNDGARDEN’s work — a legacy Cantrell insists contains not a single bad song.
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