Soundgarden vocalist Chris Cornell shocked the world when he committed suicide while on tour with his reunited band back in May 2017. The grunge group he fronted were in the midst of their first tour in 13 years. Throughout his life and career, the iconic singer had struggled with depression, agoraphobia, and drug and alcohol addiction. He’d been open about coping with those issues.
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Cornell had certainly written lyrics expressing depressed or dark thoughts before. His work with Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog, and as a solo artist featured many intense songs grappling with his demons. A few examples: “Fell on Black Days,” “Call Me a Dog,” “Black Saturday,” “Blow up the Outside World,” and his lament for the late Mother Love Bone vocalist Andrew Wood, “Say Hello 2 Heaven.”
Prior to the Soundgarden reunion, Cornell had worked with the supergroup Audioslave. The band featured three members of Rage Against the Machine—guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford, and drummer Brad Wilks. They released three studio albums between 2002 and 2007. They had urged him to get sober, which he did. But he later admitted how that was a rough patch for him as he pieced his life back together.
Too Close to Home
In his obituary in The Guardian, a quote from Cornell was resurrected about that particular period: “It was really hard to recover from, just mentally. I think Audioslave suffered from that because my feet hadn’t hit the ground yet. I was sober but I don’t think my brain was clear … It took me five years of sobriety to even get certain memories back.”
Some of Cornell’s fans have cited how the Audioslave ballad “Like a Stone” particularly affects them since his passing. His lyrics ruminating over life and death can’t help but seem that much more poignant today.
And on my deathbed I will pray
To the gods and the angels
Like a pagan to anyone
Who will take me to heaven
To a place I recall
I was there so long ago
The sky was bruised
The wine was bled
And there you led me on
Did the song provide any signs of troubles to come? Hindsight, of course, is ragingly 20/20 here—and sometimes it’s inaccurate. But “Like a Stone” does feel prophetic. As Cornell explained in a television interview from that time period, “The short version is just some guy sitting in a hotel room contemplating death and where you go and what it means and all the possibilities of that. Then coming up with an image that he liked. Like going with the philosophy of, maybe when you die and you’ve been good enough in your life then you get to go somewhere that you remember that was really cool.”
And We Thought He’d Come Out the Other Side
The fact that Cornell was found dead and alone in his hotel room makes the song now feel eerily prescient. But as anyone who has grappled with the death of a friend or loved one by suicide knows, the signs often become painfully clear only after the incident has occurred.
For the record, while the coroner ruled the singer’s death a suicide, Cornell’s widow, Vicky, asserted he had not intended to take his own life. She felt the prescription drug Ativan, which he had been taking for anxiety, impaired his judgment. Four years later, she settled out of court with the doctor who had prescribed the drug to him without, as she maintained, proper warnings or oversight.
[RELATED: Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready Shares Heartfelt Tribute to Chris Cornell with “Crying Moon”]
What the song certainly does make one wonder in retrospect is what Cornell’s final night was like to have ended up as it did. And it makes it doubly hard to swallow when we thought he was out of the woods—that he wouldn’t succumb to suicide or overdose as so many of his grunge-era peers had. Kurt Cobain, Andrew Wood, Layne Staley, Shannon Hoon, Scott Weiland, Chester Bennington…
For a fascinating read from a psychiatric perspective on Cornell’s lyrics as well as those of other popular music artists, check out the recent paper “Fell on Black Days: Analyzing the Song Lyrics of Chris Cornell for Insight Into Depression and Suicide” by Kevin P. Conway, Patrick McGrain, and Michelle Theodory. It’s available on the website for the National Library of Medicine.
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