Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron says fans may soon get to hear the last recordings late singer Chris Cornell made with the band. In this week’s episode of the Let There Be Talk podcast with Dean Delray, Cameron revealed that the surviving members of the group are mixing down tracks recorded with producer Terry Date — who helmed the band’s 1989 Louder Than Love and 1991’s Badmotorfinger — for what he said will be an eight-track LP.
“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…,” Cameron said of the unnamed tracks the singer worked on before his death by suicide at 52 in a Detroit hotel room in May 2017. “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.”
Cameron said the band, which also includes guitarist Kim Thayil and bassist Ben Shepherd, recorded all their rehearsals and wrote a “bunch of stuff” together and that the album will feature some material from their live rehearsals on which Cornell played guitar. “Then we’re using the vocals from these demos that he put together, with the music that we had written together … just kind of building on top of that,” he said of the sessions he and Thayil have discussed a number of times over the past few years.
The mixing is taking place at the moment with Joe Barresi (Avenged Sevenfold, Bad Religion), with Cameron noting that the relatively short tracklist features “pretty much all there is with vocals,” though Thayil may work with some leftover instrumentals. “So maybe we’ll do some new stuff together,” he said. “Which would be fine by me.”
Cameron said there is no release date yet, so for now the trio are just working to get the project 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 because it’s been kind of a long process just to get to here,” he added. The drummer said he’s been listening to those demos since the band recorded them and he revealed that there are three or four “really, really strong songs.”
“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,” he said. “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.”
Earlier this month, Blabbermouth reported Thayil described the process as “very untraditional. It’s sideway and forward and backward,” likening it to a “forensic” deep-dive. “We have to look at what we have and explore what we got, what it needs, and to kind of fill in the holes and complete it,” Thayil said. “And we’re completing it. We’re down a man, so it’s three of us trying to do … But fortunately, we’re building on the things that Chris did complete, so we’re able to look at that and say, ‘Okay, here’s his vocal. Here’s what it needs. Here’s his guitar part.’ And it’s working. It’s working great.”
Cornell died after Soundgarden performed at Detroit’s Fox Theatre on May 17, 2017 during the band’s second phase, which kicked off in 2010 after they reunited following a 13-year hiatus.
Listen to Cameron discuss the final Soundgarden album below.
from Billboard https://ift.tt/Vy6rfsF
