No One Sings Like Chris Cornell Anymore, Vol. 1

Thoughts on the Soundgarden singer's new, 10-track covers album

In January 2016, Chris Cornell packed up his kids, his wife, and his dogs and de-camped to the Beverly Hills Hotel in Southern California. He’d just recently wrapped a short tour of Australia, followed by a smattering of performances throughout America — including sets at the LA Forum and the Dallas Cowboys stadium — and was eager to get to work on his next, creative project; a genuinely fascinating journey through his own, vast musical taste.

Over the next four months, Chris and his family took over a small wing of the posh hotel. In the mornings they’d wake up and all have breakfast together. Then they’d head over to Henson Studios, just off Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, where producer Brendan O’Brien would be waiting to kick off the day’s work. While his children did their homework, took piano lessons and played video games, Chris entered the recording booth and used his iconic voice to breathe new life into an eclectic array of different cover songs. Among them were a mix of old favorites, unexpected pop hits, and wildly obscure deep cuts.

For three years, this music has been left sitting in the vault with the public none the wiser to their existence. Then, a couple of weeks back and seemingly out out of nowhere, his estate surprised the world by unveiling 10 of the tracks he’d laid down that fruitful Winter and Spring as part of a new collection titled No One Sings Like You Anymore, Vol. 1.

Chris Cornell is no stranger to crafting odd and dramatic re-imaginations of other people’s work. There was the time he transformed Michael Jackson’s era-defining dance sensation “Billie Jean,” into an eviscerating lover’s lament. Or the time he and Soundgarden recorded Black Sabbath’s metal masterpiece “Into The Void,” but swapped Ozzy’s apocalyptic warnings about the effects of pollution for a speech attributed to the Seattle Indian chief, Sealth. Then there was the time he combined the music of U2’s tearjerker “One,” with they lyrics from Metallica’s brutal epic “One” for a wholly unique and incredibly cheeky new piece of music. No One Sings Like You Anymore is further proof positive that he could make something unique out of just about anything.

The album opens with an electronica-tinged take on the song “Get it While You Can.” The song was written by Howard Tate, but made famous by Janis Joplin, who recorded it in 1971 for her final, solo studio album Pearl. The parallels are a bit eerie. Joplin, gifted with one of the most raw and arresting voices of her generation used “Get it While You Can,” as the final word on her first posthumous full-length release. Chris, gifted with one of the most raw and arresting voices of his own generation, used it as the first word on his.

Just like on his 2015 album Higher Truth, all the instruments were played by either Chris or O’Brien, and its truly exhilarating to hear the way that both men stripped down, and sonically re-imagined so many of these different arrangements. Among the standouts are his propulsive, yet wounded rendition of Ghostland Observatory’s “Sad Sad City,” the somber, nearly-countrified interpretation of Terry Reid’s “To Be Treated Rite,” and a mesmerizing, but whistle-free, cover of Guns N’ Roses’ immortal ballad “Patience.” That last one was compelling enough to earn him his first-ever No. 1 record as a solo artist on Billboard’s rock chart when it was unveiled back in October.

A couple of the tracks included as part of this record will certainly sound familiar to Chris’s longtime fans. In 2015 he visited the Sirius XM studios and performed a live version of Prince’s exquisite love saga “Nothing Compares 2 U” that currently has nearly 100,000,000 views on Youtube. He and O’Brien tackled the song once again to give it a “proper” once-over in the studio.

Another cut, “Stay With Me Baby,” was originally included as part of the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s HBO drama Vinyl. Though Chris was a genuine soul music fan — one of the thrill’s of his life was receiving a Grammy for Best Metal Performance in 1995 from no less than Al Green himself — he actually wanted to tackle the Velvet Underground classic “Venus in Furs,” for that project. But when The Strokes’ frontman Julian Casablancas called dibs, he went with “Stay With Me Baby,” instead.

It was a fortuitous plan B. “Stay With Me Baby” finds Chris resuscitating his best “Call Me a Dog” croon through the introduction, before bursting into a colorful parabola of heart-ravaged screaming through the choruses. When people say, “No one sings like him anymore,” songs like this are basically what they mean.

Of course, you couldn’t hope to have a Chris Cornell covers album without the inclusion of at least one song by a Beatle. The Liverpudlians were far and away the most influential force throughout his musical life, and he tackled selections from their vast catalog numerous times throughout his career. My personal favorite is Soundgarden’s raucous performance of “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey” that was laid down at for a Peel Session at the BBC in 1989.

For No One Sings Like You Anymore, Vol. 1, he returned to the solo oeuvre of his favorite Fab, the acerbic John, for a surprisingly tender rendition of the Double Fantasy standout “Watching the Wheels.” Lennon originally wrote “Watching the Wheels” as a way to address all the outside whisperers, wondering where in the hell their hero had disappeared to, while he stayed ensconced in the Dakota, baking bread, and raising his young son Sean.

You can’t help but smile thinking about Chris laying down his own version of the song while his children quietly observe from just beyond the other side of the studio glass. It’s far and away the most touching song on the entire collection.

“This song was one of his favorites because of the personal connection that he had to it,” Chris’s wife Vicky told Forbes. “Chris put aside his self-destructive behavior from the '90s and early 2000s and he decided that he wanted to be clean and start his life and now he had a family. And that became the most important thing to him.”

My favorite selection however is also the most unexpected. You might not figure Chris as being that big of a fan of the ‘70s pop phenomenon Electric Light Orchestra. And yet, his take on Jeff Lynne’s glittering 1973 hit “Showdown” is revelatory. In Chris’s hands the maximalist, technicolor grandeur of the original recording is sacrificed at the alter of a janky, metallic guitar riff that stabs its way through the very heart of the song itself. The effect imbues lyrics like this one with an increasingly devastating context:

“Bad dreamer, what's your name?
Looks like we're ridin' on the same train
Looks as though there'll be more pain
There's gonna be a Showdown”

For much of the verses, Chris is left to sing alone over an unrelenting, percussive clank of gated drums and jittery chains. Then the chorus hits, and an entire army of Chris’s recorded across multiple tracks fly into wail in desperation about the rain falling all over the world. It’s a stunning performance, and yet another exquisite example for his singular ear for sonic reinterpretation.

Of all the unique and interesting things about this collection, perhaps the most tantalizing is the tag at the very end of its title: Vol 1. Four months is a loooooong time to spend in a recording studio. You have to hope, or at least wonder, whether the 10 songs included here represents the tip of a sizable iceberg of material that Chris left behind before his tragic passing in 2017.

Based purely on what made it onto the first installment of No One Sings Like You Anymore, you should expect a lot more of the unexpected whenever the next installment arrives. Here’s hoping that it gets here sooner, rather than later.

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Last week, after the first installment of this newsletter went out, I mentioned on Twitter that I would give away a signed copy of my book Total F*cking Godhead: The Biography of Chris Cornell. All you had to do was subscribe.

Well, I held a random drawing and I’d like to congratulate Ana Campos Day for the winning the big prize!

Seriously, thank you to everyone who’s subscribed thus far to Sonic Breadcrumbs. I’ve got some really cool stuff in the works that I can’t wait to share with you all.

Be safe and stay tuned!