A few minutes ago, Chris Cornell was every inch a rock star.
Stalking the stage during an April show at Avalon in Boston, the feral singer previewed songs from “Carry On,” his new album that came out Tuesday, and sang classics from the two mammoth rock groups he fronted. Every fist-pump-worthy high note was ecstatically cheered by an adoring sold-out crowd.
Belting out brawny teeth-rattlers such as “Outshined” by Soundgarden (the most muscular of the groups to take the flannel carpet ride out of Seattle in the ’90s) and “Cochise” from Audioslave (the new-millennium supergroup he formed with three-quarters of Rage Against the Machine), Cornell moved with a leonine grace and sang, at 42, with a voice still limber enough to make an Olympic gymnast envious of the way he sticks his landings.
But now, backstage calmly sipping hot tea to soothe that golden-god-of-rock throat, Cornell is soft-spoken and very much a normal dude. But either side of Cornell — widescreen or life-size — is a portrait of a happy man.
He is happy to be solo again, following the February demise of Audioslave after three albums. He is happily married to his second wife, Vicky, who sits in on the end of the interview because, the mother of his two toddlers says only half-jokingly, he won’t even tell her what his new songs are about.
Unlike with previous outings, Cornell wants not only to showcase “Carry On” but also to rediscover every phase of his career, through ever-evolving set lists. Playing some Soundgarden and Temple of the Dog songs for the first time has been particularly exciting.
“My thing really has been trying to do these songs the way I always wanted to do them, and enjoy doing new songs as well as anything old that I feel like doing, and being in a frame of my mind where I’m not hammered ever, totally sober and awake and aware and experiencing all these songs that way,” he says.
With “Carry On,” he is combining the different and the familiar. Cornell fuses his love of the meaty, outsized rock with other influences ranging from the Beatles to Jeff Buckley to early Rod Stewart on a record that is his most lyrically straightforward yet stylistically varied.
Producer Steve Lillywhite, famed for his work with U2 and the Dave Matthews Band, says he was attracted initially by Cornell’s voice and his willingness to examine “how you move through your career and still keep your audience but change your music. He doesn’t want to do the same songs that he did. He’s a different person now.”
There is the whimsical hard funk of “She’ll Never Be Your Man,” partially based on the true story of a friend whose girlfriend left him for another woman. The taut, acoustic “Ghosts” finds Cornell realizing that not only has his physical geography changed, but his emotional place in the world as well. And “Safe and Sound,” a bittersweet musing on the meaning of peace and mutual respect, in which Cornell declares a belief in “the promised land” as stately horns sigh in the background, is his “Imagine.”
Hope was not a major commodity in previous Cornell songs such as “Pretty Noose,” “Black Hole Sun” and “Like a Stone.” And he admits with a laugh that the juxtaposition of him as “a guy who was in macho bands, who took his shirt off, to come out and say ‘I still have hope that things could actually be peaceful and great and good’ — and it’s not the ’60s — is a little weird.”
