Metal, Hardcore, Indie, Rock
Mixing sessions for Soundgarden‘s last studio album including their late guitarist and vocalist Chris Cornell have started, as per theprp. For the past year or so, the band’s remaining members have been spending a lot of time refining the recordings that Cornell left behind for this future album. For these fresh sessions, producer Terry Date (Deftones, Pantera), who collaborated with Soundgarden on “Louder Than Love” and “Badmotorfinger,” was brought in. Joe Barresi (Tool, Avenged Sevenfold) has now received that record and is in charge of the eight songs’ mixing sessions. Aside from the grief process that followed Cornell’s tragic death in 2017, the band’s creation of this record was hampered for a number of years by a contentious legal fight with his wife.
Seven songs that were supposed to be on that record were discovered during those court procedures.
The band’s drummer/vocalist Matt Cameron, who recently spoke on Dean Delray’s “Let There Be Talk” podcast, revealed that eight tracks with Cornell’s vocals will be included on the band’s posthumous CD. Cameron continued by discussing the sources of the information discovered throughout this endeavour.
We’d been sending demos back and forth since, like, 2013, ’14, something like that. I would send Chris some stuff. He would rearrange it, make a song out of it… I sent him three tracks, and then he would sing on top of the instrumentals that I’d written and rearrange them and everything. And then we started getting together in, like, 2015, ’16 at a couple of different studios, so we were preparing to make another album before that last tour in 2017.
We recorded all the rehearsals and everything. And we did start writing a bunch of stuff together. But the stuff we’re working on now was from when… We are using some of the live rehearsal stuff, like some of the guitar stuff that Chris played guitar on, and then we’re using the vocals from these demos that he put together, with the music that we had written together. And, yeah, just kind of building on top of that.
Cameon responded by discussing the scope of the content presented.
Eight songs. I think that that’s pretty much all there is with vocals. We had some instrumentals left over that Kim wants work on. So maybe we’ll do some new stuff together, which would be fine by me.
Cameon mentioned intentions for the album’s release.
Well, we don’t really have a [release] date yet. We’re just gonna try to get this thing mixed, get it over the finish line, and then hopefully we’ll have a better idea what’s gonna come next. We’re just taking it one step at a time ’cause it’s been kind of a long process just to get to here.
About the feelings aroused by working on this project without Cornell’s presence.
Well, I’d been listening to those demos since we recorded them together. And I always thought there’s three or four really, really strong songs. So, I’m really looking forward to getting it done and putting it out there. And I’m hoping the reaction won’t be too intense for people, but I know that it will be because it has been for us.
But I think at this stage of the game, we’ve been listening to it so much that I think we’ve built a little bit of a callus up to the emotional side of it, and we’re just trying to get all the tracks. And it sounds like Soundgarden. It’s just like we’re working on a Soundgarden album. We are.
