Metal Anarchy

During a recent interview with Oh, Hush! Reads, Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil discussed the sessions for the band’s final album with the late Chris Cornell. He says the process has been “very untraditional.”

Thayil said the following:

“The process, of course, is very untraditional. It’s sideways and forward and backward. I’ve often humorously referred to it as forensic in nature. 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. 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. But it’s not as if there’s a previously budgeted schedule or money to work on this project. It’s not, like, ‘Here’s the starting point, and now a couple of months from now we’ll have an end product.’ We kind of have a number of partly completed things and some demos and some ideas that have very good performances and great songs, and now we’re kind of trying to build them and record them and finish them. And it was during other things that were scheduled. Matt had a number of PEARL JAM tours. Ben had a number of obligations. There was the Hall Of Fame stuff, and then there was the Asian Hall Of Fame stuff that I was in. And then there’s the book that I’ve been working on. We had some losses in our family — people lost some family members, which is gonna happen as you get older, I suppose, so all of us will experience these kinds of things. And in a way, that was great because we didn’t have all these other things happening with a very fixed scheduled commitment. We were able to build this around all the other stuff that was happening.”

He continued when asked about song titles:

“Well, some of those you may already know because they were published over the years as a consequence of some of the legal stuff we were talking about. But there is some thought about changing some of the titles because some of them are working titles that I had come up with or Ben had come up with or even Matt. So, they were just references. It’s, like, ‘Oh, we’ll call this song this for the time being so we know what we’re talking about when we’re referencing it from the demo, the tape or the disc or the stream or the link or whatever. So I think the titles are just fine. Often at the beginning we’ll come up with just kind of humorous titles. I think, for instance, the song ‘Blood On The Valley Floor’ [from the 2012 album ‘King Animal’], which is this riff and music I’d come up with, I think originally the band and some of our crew guys and our engineer guys had called that song ‘Dino Jack’, ’cause I jokingly referred to this one riff, and I described the riff, like if you had to masturbate a brontosaurus or something. And so everyone’s laughing. So we just started calling it ‘Dino Jack’. We all know that, but I don’t think anyone else knows that story. But once the song was in a complete arrangement and Chris came up with some lyrics, it became ‘Blood On The Valley Floor’, which is a really cool title.”

[via Blabbermouth]