Traditionally, the best of them have been released as the flip sides of singles and sometimes when there is enough stuff that’s really good it gets released in some sort of rarities package. There’s usually a very good reason the songs that don’t make an album are left unheard. Most bands are lucky if they have an album’s worth of first-rate outtakes collecting dust in some studio archive. 12: The Best of The Cutting Edge, 1965-66- Bob Dylan. Cornell reminds the listener that this is not the case: acoustic instruments can rock, too. Too many acoustic albums are sleepy affairs, as if the electric guitar was meant for rock and the acoustic was meant for slow, confessional ballads. This variety has the benefit of keeping the album fresh. There’s even a song (“Our Time In The Universe”) that successfully blends rock and electronic dance music, the synthesis Cornell failed to create on Scream, by sticking to conventional rock instruments and melodies and attaching them to a beat and chorus that wouldn’t sound out of place in the world of strobe lights, DJs, and Ecstasy (as a bonus track there’s a more straightforward rock mix of this track, as well as three other songs that maintain the quality and sound of the main album). There are many ballads (“Dead Wishes”, “Before We Disappear”, “Through the Window”, “Let Your Eyes Wander”) but there are also plenty of songs that blend balladry with the intensity of heavier rock, held in check by the acoustic presentation (“Murderer Of Blue Skies”, “Higher Truth”, “Circling”). Taken as a whole, Higher Truth sounds like a serious rock band playing a mostly acoustic set before the big show starts (there are electric instruments amid the mandolins here: check out the buzzsaw guitar solo on the first single, “Nearly Forgot My Broken Heart”). He’s the howling banshee lead singer of Soundgarden and Audioslave, two of the heaviest rock bands of all time, whose voice could peel the paint off your walls. There’s no shortage of indications about who Cornell really is on the album, and he’s not Jack Johnson or James Taylor. That’s not to say that this is an acoustic singer/songwriter album. Inspired by his recent solo tours, Cornell strips down the production on Higher Truth to focus on the subtler, more acoustic side of his sound. Cornell has followed up what is certainly one of the worst albums ever released by a major artist with the best album of his solo career. This just makes Higher Truth that much sweeter. Fans didn’t shrug off Scream as a misstep in a long career it was almost universally hated. It took 2012’s excellent Soundgarden reunion album King Animal to gain back Cornell’s credibility. Scream, a train wreck collaboration with Timbaland that buried Cornell’s songs under a mountain of electronic dance music, was such an embarrassing fiasco it would have killed the career of a less established star. It took him six years, a reunion with the mighty Soundgarden, and a solo acoustic tour, to recover from that steaming mess. The last time we heard from Chris Cornell the Solo Artist was 2009’s Scream. Sadly, now his own lyrics in this song could not be more relevant than at this moment, and I sing them now in reverence as I pay tribute to this unequalled artist who has given all of our lives so much inspiration and made the world so much more interesting. It has a timeless relevance for me and practically everyone I know. “I performed his song Nothing Compares 2 U for the first time a couple months ago. “Prince’s music is the soundtrack to the soulful and beautiful universe he created, and we have all been privileged to be part of that amazing world,” he stated. It would be one of the last songs recorded by the singer – the final being The Promise, from the film of the same name. But of all these reinterpretations, it was his take on the Prince-penned Sinéad O’ Connor hit Nothing Compares 2 U that seemed able to stop any listener in their tracks. As he grew in confidence as a solo artist in his own right, Chris began putting his own stamp on famous songs by more mainstream artists including Michael Jackson, Bob Marley and U2.
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