Norah Jones: Requiem for Chris Cornell
Times are gone for honest men and sometimes, far too long for snakes …
Times are gone
For honest men
Sometimes, far too long for snakes …
It was four years ago today that Chris Cornell was found dead in a hotel room following a show with Soundgarden at the Fox Theatre in Detroit the night before. He had hung himself, bringing to a close a lifelong struggle with depression and addiction. Norah Jones played the Fox six nights after Soundgarden on May 23rd and delivered this achingly tragic, elegiac cover of Black Hole Sun. I can’t watch it with choking up or even breaking down in tears. The grief is palpable.
We can see her reading the lyrics. This is not part of her repertoire, it has been put together, ad hoc, for the occasion. And yet it’s perfect. I don’t know how she got through it without breaking down, even just a little bit, though you can see she was close at moments. I don’t know if she was paying tribute to a friend or a beloved icon. What I do know, is that we are forever blessed that it was captured so beautifully, as there aren’t any other clips from this show that I can find.
Cornell was roughly my age, a few years older, and I admire his songwriting quite a bit. I’ve struggled with suicidal ideation nearly my entire life, attempting to push a jackknife into my belly in second grade (lucky for me, it was harder than I thought it would be). I’ve been an alcoholic since the first time I got drunk in seventh grade. Any time a fellow traveler succumbs to suicide or overdose it hits me hard, especially when I already felt a kinship through their art.
I wasn’t familiar with Soundgarden’s music when Superunkown came out but I fell in love with it immediately when I did find it. I fell in love all over again when I got around to reading the lyrics and listened. Chris Cornell was a singer of staggering power, with a four-octave range and a matching emotive reach. But he was just as good a songwriter. The songs are intelligent and inciteful, allegoric and impressionist while remaining legible. They are carefully structured but never stilted. Reading back through that songbook though, one is struck by how often shame is present, as an admission, an observation, or a theme. Shame is all too often a powerful driver of addiction and depression.
In, Fell on Black Days, the song most explicitly about depression, the shame driving it is more than implication.
Whomsoever I've cured, I've sickened now
And whomsoever I've cradled, I've put you down
I'm a searchlight soul, they say, but I can't see it in the night
I'm only faking, when I get it right, when I get it right
In The Day I Tried to Live he tries to make an effort and finds himself wallowing “ in the blood and mud with all the other pigs” deciding he should have just stayed in bed and admitting he’s nothing but a liar.
Fresh Tendrils just comes right out and says it.
Long time coming
It seemed to get me through
Long time coming
Many served the few
And long to taste the shame
That bows down before you
Shame shame
Throw yourself away
Give me little bits of
More than I can take
And of course,
In my eyes, indisposed
In disguises no one knows
Hides the face, lies the snake
In the sun in my disgrace
The grip of suicidal ideation is powerful in a way that’s difficult for those who haven’t experienced it to understand. Like Suicide was written in response to the death of a robin who’d flow into Cornell’s window. He went out in the yard and seeing the bird was done for, fetched a brick and smashed its head to put it out of its misery. In the song, the sequence of the bird’s near-fatal accident and the subsequent mercy killing becomes ‘just like suicide’ to the author either contemplating shooting himself or having put the gun in his mouth and pulled back. There’s a double movement of trying to romanticize suicide. The bird first becomes a martyr, flying so sweetly and then a ‘gift’ to Cornell. Then in the saturation of his own thoughts of suicide, his empathy is elevated. “How I feel for you. I feel for you.”
I have no idea what Chris Cornell had to feel shame about but I’m nearly certain that the hold it had on him was irrational and disproportionate. Tragically, that’s how the shame that drives depression works. The loss left in its wake is well captured by Norah Jones’ futile plea, plaintively calling for a friend to return, for the pain to be washed away.
But in other moments, Cornell knew hope and expressed it passionately, exhorting others.
My own elegy for the man, his own words, edited lightly for hope and charity.
Take, if you want a slice, if you want a piece
If it feels alright
Break, if you like the sound, if it gets you up
If it takes you down
Share, if it makes you sleep, if it sets you free
If it helps you breathe
Cry, if you want to cry, if it helps you see
If it clears your eyes
Hate, if you want to hate, if it keeps you safe
If it makes you brave
Take, if you want a slice, if you want a piece
If it feels alright
Cry, if you want to cry, if it helps you see
If it clears your eyes
Hate, if you want to hate, if it keeps you safe
If it makes you brave
Pray, if you want to pray, if you like to kneel
If you like to lay