By Jem Aswad
Executive Editor, Music
Soundgarden’s Ben Shepherd hinted at an unreleased Soundgarden album on Saturday in a tribute post to Chris Cornell, the band’s late frontman, on the eighth anniversary of Cornell’s death.
In the lengthy post, Shepherd speaks of being reminded of an unreleased song written by Cornell and drummer Matt Cameron called “The Road Less Traveled” that he says is “for our album that has yet to be named. Just hearing Chris’ voice helps, I know he did that for everyone he knew… help them, he did for me, filled with self doubt and indebtedness and in just his tone knew what I was going through and forgave me like he always did even when he was older.
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“It’s at this point of recording all of our previous albums I’d get this overwhelming hit of awe, camaraderie, power of creativity, majesty even, and love, from the music, and my bandmates… and I guess just pure life force.”
The song is presumably one of the seven at the center of a bitter and protracted lawsuit brought against the surviving bandmembers by Cornell’s widow, Vicky Cornell, in 2019 over ownership of seven unreleased recordings, in varying states of completion, made before Cornell’s death in 2017. Over the next two years, the two sides sparred on a variety of matters, including the value of Chris Cornell’s participation in Soundgarden businesses and the use of social media to continue to promote the band. The lawsuit was settled in 2023, clearing the way for the release of the songs, although no official plans have been announced. Cornell’s song catalog, comprising some 241 titles, was sold to Hipgnosis Songs in 2020.
Soundgarden will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame later this year, and the bandmembers will perform — as Soundgarden — at Black Sabbath’s forthcoming “Back to the Beginning” farewell concert in England in July, although no lead singer has been mentioned. The time would seem to be ripe for the release of the aforementioned songs; reps for Cornell and the bandmembers did not immediately respond to Variety‘s requests for comment.
The band formed in 1984 and released five studio albums before splitting in 1997, with Cornell undertaking a solo career and forming the band Audioslave with members of Rage Against the Machine. Soundgarden reunited in 2010 and released on new album, “King Animal,” in 2012. The band was on a North American tour when Cornell died of an apparent suicide in his Detroit hotel room in 2017. The surviving bandmembers have reunited on several occasions, most recently in Seattle with singer Shain Shepherd under the name Nudedragons.
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