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I've always been really anti-social, and being relatively famous has just given me an excuse to go out even less. If I didn't play in Soundgarden I'd have no excuse for being the way I am. My friends and family would hate me, whereas now they probably feel sorry for me. Y'know, 'Poor kid, he can't come out because he gets hassled a lot.'
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My favorite Bob Dylan record is the very first one where he sings one Bob Dylan song and the rest of them are his interpretations of the Dust Bowl-era folk songs, or even going back as far as the mass influx of people coming into the U.S. during the gold rush. His interpretations of those songs are incredible.
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My first favorite band that made music important to me was the Beatles. I was a little kid. I didn't know who was singing what song or who wrote what song.
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I was depressed for a long time. If you’re depressed long enough, it’s almost a comfort, a state of mind that you’ve made peace with because you’ve been in it so long. It’s a very selfish world.
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A lot of what attracted people to Nirvana was that they were like the people you went to high school with.
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One thing that I have thought ever since Temple of the Dog is that I would never say no to an interesting collaboration, and that's partly where Audioslave came from.
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I wasn't good in school. I didn't do sports. I sat in the bedroom and listened to records. Because the Beatles did whatever they wanted to, I took that as a kid and said, 'That's what rock is.'
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I always looked at rock & roll as the voice of regular people, of an economic group not in charge.
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I don't really go mountain biking per se, like a proper sport.
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As a child, I was this record collector/listener that would sit in a room and listen to the entire Beatles catalog alone, over and over and over again.
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In spite of my lack of education, I didn't lack direction.
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There was about two years where I was more or less agoraphobic and didn't deal with anybody, didn't talk to anybody, didn't have any friends at all.
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'Black Hole Sun' was written in a car when I was driving home from the studio one night. Pretty much everything that you hear was written in my head.
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RockNet Interview: Chris Cornell of Soundgarden (May 1, 1996).
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My history of singing has always probably been closer to a David Bowie approach than, for example, an AC/DC approach.
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When you become a parent, you leave a lot of things behind and refocus, maybe on how simple life really is and what few things there really are to worry about. And everything else can go by the wayside.
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I can go from one extreme to another, from playing at the Sydney Opera House on the Songbook tour to shows with Soundgarden at Voodoo Fest, all in a week.
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When you see a country take care of its people regardless of class, or how much money they make, or what color they are, that's pretty inspiring.
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I'm sure I could start a band tomorrow that would have different influences and would want to do something completely different than anything I've done.
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For years, I wasn't feeling good about myself. My head wasn't clear. I was doing nothing productive.
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Soundgarden signing to a major, then Mother Love Bone, and seeing the same happen to Alice in Chains. We were all suddenly making music and recording at the same time, and we had money to do it. It wasn't like a $2,000 recording that you do over a weekend. It's like, 'Wow, maybe this will be our job.'
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I try to solve my problems by writing music and recording albums, but you know what's really funny about that? Once the album becomes a success, it doesn't solve your problems. It just gets harder to write the next album.
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There's no way to be a 30-year-old band, go on tour, and pretend the nostalgia isn't happening.
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Companies figured out that the easiest way to make money was to reissue records that the accounting department had paid for years ago and already made a profit.