Chris Cornell Interview

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As Soundgarden fans wait for a new album with great anticipation, frontman Chris Cornell has something to tide them over. The musician recently wrote and recorded a new track, �The Keeper,� for the official soundtrack to Machine Gun Preacher, a film based on the life of humanitarian Sam Childers. Cornell, who previously penned the theme song, �You Know My Name,� to the 2006 James Bond flick Casino Royale, spoke with us about how this opportunity came about and what it was like to write such an emotionally heavy track. Plus, Cornell offers a teaser of what we can expect from the upcoming Soundgarden disc� and when we might expect it.
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How did you get involved with Machine Gun Preacher?
A friend of mine is a good friend of [director] Mark Forrester and he had heard about the story and read the script. He came up with the idea to have Mark have me write a song or some music for the film. Mark liked that idea. That lead to me reading the script and I was really blown away by the scope of the story. I could have written an album�s worth of songs following that. It was actually very difficult to focus on one song because of the scope of the story.
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Did you get to see the movie before you wrote the song?
In this case I didn�t. They had just started filming the week I spoke to the director about it. It isn�t to say that I need to see it but it would help in the sense of knowing whether I�d gotten the right mood. You get a visual sense of a song when you see it and I think that can help. What really helped me was going on the Angels of East Africa website, which is the website started by Sam Childers for his organization� That�s really where I got in touch with what the visual mood would be like.
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Did that make the process easier?
Well, it�s not a life I�m living. It doesn�t include experiences that I�ve had so it isn�t like writing a song for my own album. It�s definitely a collaboration with the filmmaker, but it�s also trying to capture something I can create honestly without actually having had those experiences. Seeing the photos of the children and the orphanage really helped me get in touch with that.

It sounds like this was a much different experience than writing a song for a James Bond film.
Yeah! That had its challenges but as a songwriter I�m always going to try to find some emotional in-road. Otherwise it�s not exciting to me and I�m not really interested in it. Being able to concentrate on this first book that [James Bond author] Ian Fleming wrote where this character appears and how he�s still human then were some of things I really liked about it. I loved the film and I love Daniel Craig as an actor. But I wasn�t worried about making any mistakes in terms of how the song would come across lyrically since I didn�t feel necessarily that I owed anybody anything. In this case, I think the story is more about the children than it is anybody else and I felt like I had a responsibility to create a simple song that would get people to at least listen and hopefully, in the context of the film, be moved enough where they might want to get a download where all the proceeds go to the charity. [The proceeds] go directly to the children that the song is about. So this song definitely carried more weight for me emotionally.
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What are your plans for the rest of the year beyond this song?
I have some shows with Soundgarden. Soundgarden is finishing our next album. I have a lot of acoustic solo touring as well. Pretty much both those things happening nonstop until the end of the year.
 

Do you have a sense of when the Soundgarden record might come out?
Sometime in the spring. Right now we�re talking about May.
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What can fans expect from the album?
It�s varied. Like any Soundgarden album it�s pretty broad. There certainly isn�t one mood. There�s a feeling that I�m getting from the record as a whole and it�s different than anything I�ve ever done. It�s fairly broad.