Music of the Day, 1 December 2023
i don't remember half the time if i'm hiding or i'm lost
Sometimes the radio station in my mind has a mind of its own. For example, I’d been thinking that come December, I’d focus more on folk music.1 Winter’s2 my favorite season and whether rightly or wrongly, my head canon is that folk songwriters share my fondness for the cold and dark more than others. Yesterday, I even did some preliminary searches of my music library, hoping to seed appropriate themes to come to mind in song form.
What started insistently playing in my head this morning was not a folk tune … quite the opposite.
“Searching with My Good Eye Closed” is a deep cut from Soundgarden’s 1991 album Badmotorfinger. I very likely bought the disc back then on the basis of hearing “Outshined”3 on the radio, and quickly discovered that it wasn’t the best track on it. As is typical for me, “best track” is an ever-moving target, but “Searching” is always near the top.
The late Chris Cornell’s amazing vocals are but a small part of Soundgarden’s greatness. He was also the band’s primary lyricist (although all band members contributed on Badmotorfinger). Each musician—Matt Cameron on drums; Cornell on rhythm guitar; bassist Ben Shepherd; and lead guitarist Kim Thayil—contributes to the synergy that makes this album so powerful. They sound stellar together.
For me, Soundgarden is quite evocative of Rush: the music is complex and best experienced via headphones; each musician is very talented and masterfully plays as part of the ensemble; and the cerebral lyrics are meaty. Unlike Rush, though, the lyrics are often fairly ambiguous, giving the listener space to think about and interpret them in one’s own context. That’s why this disc was almost always in my car’s five-disc CD player in the ‘90s.
“Searching with My Good Eye Closed” has a slow-burning extended intro, with the amusing “See ‘n Say” farm animals closing with the line “The devil says.” The howl climaxes with the full band entering with a brooding and beautiful low end under Cornell’s vocals and Thayil’s tasty guitar. These days, the title seems applicable to too many areas of my life, but the song is so good that I can’t help but play it on repeat. And when I’m satisfied with that, I inevitably blast the entire album. I’m pretty sure I also bought Superunknown when it was released in 1994; alas, I no longer have it in any format.
Being a Soundgarden fan gave me some cred with one of my stepkids. The family was on a road trip and taking turns choosing music; he chose Audioslave, which I’d not heard before. When I remarked that I liked Chris Cornell’s voice, he argued that it wasn’t Cornell until I was able to prove it to him.
Such a talent, gone too soon. In addition to his music with Soundgarden, I often crank up the 2013 RRHoF super jam, which includes Cornell because he inducted Heart that year.4
for very large values of “folk”
I know that meteorologically speaking, winter is still a few weeks away. Calendars are as much a social construction as our subdivisions of days, though, and my preference is to mark the change of seasons at the start of a month, primarily so I can set my computer background to my beloved Swedish winter slideshow early
Honestly, the line “I’m looking California and feeling Minnesota” is what did it
It was also my introduction to Tom Morello