Murderer of Blue Skies
Chris Cornell
By Natalie Silver
I was that kid rolling up to every soccer game with thick strips of eyeblack underlining the glare of my impermeable pregame focus, excessive amounts of caffeine in my Nalgene (thanks, Dad) and the hardest rock I knew escaping the windows of my family’s silver minivan. I was ready to party, and I showed up to win.
I had one pregame album that always did the trick: Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger, which basically became the soundtrack to my prepubescent life. It is a compilation of pure, raging, hard rock and primal screams—noise that served the dual purposes of both riling up my victorious enthusiasm and satiating my agony in defeat, whatever was appropriate depending on the circumstances. And no, this is not a metaphor. I am, in fact, talking about winning or losing soccer games, which was a weekly reality that pretty much represented the entire range of my emotional being—violently vacillating from soaring euphoria to the depths of self-loathing and shame. And, like many competitors, I truly believed in the consistency of my pregame ritual and music. Specifically, I truly believed that I required the aural transmission Chris Cornell’s intensity to activate my inner savage on the field.
I can’t say it didn’t work. As I grew up, I turned to Cornell’s guidance in other areas of my life.
I grew older, got more emo, and my emotions complicated as they became rooted in darker and deeper concepts and experiences—mental health and illness, love and betrayal, intimacy and commitment, risk and fear, self-actualization and perfectionism, a flawed universe and my role in it. My taste evolved, and as it did, I, perhaps subconsciously, traced the trajectory of Cornell’s work on my own timeline. Somehow, my discoveries of his more broody and tender pieces synchronized with times in my life that paralleled those sentiments. When I discovered “Murderer of Blue Skies” on his 2015 album Higher Truth, I welcomed its songs in minor and words in torment as a complement to my own period of wrangled introspection—a stage of my life in which my view of the world would be harshened or rosied by something other than a win or a loss.
Higher Truth, which ended up being the last studio work before his suicide in 2017, is Cornell’s total artistic masterpiece—after over three decades of acts including Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog, Audioslave and solo work. I love it all, but I truly believe that this last solo studio album is the culmination of all of his artistic talent and torment as it somehow brings the heat and fury of true hard rock, the anguish of grunge, and the liberation of early punk to an album of pure, beautiful and tragic lullabies.
Cameron Crowe calls “Murderer of Blue Skies” the ultimate anti-love love song of a protagonist who naively consents to the promise of love and loses hard, reflecting in blameless agony. It’s tender, sweet and universally heartbreaking, and became an essential piece of a boyish, 12-song testament to Cornell’s life, love, torment and talent that ultimately lives on as his dying words.
Some may argue Cornell’s music was his fuel for life; others may see it as the natural carnage of his own self-destruction. Perhaps it is both, which makes enjoying the raw beauty of his music undeniably and irrevocably painful. Perhaps that is simply the music doing its job.