Best two rock voices I've heard in a last few years both have been from grunge bands: it's Eddie Vedder and the other one is Chris Cornell from Soundgarden.
Bruce Dickinson
Stone Temple Pilots, Bush, and Silverchair are taking the simplest elements of Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam and melding them into one homogenous thing.
Chris Cornell
Soundgarden was incredibly democratic, and I was really proud of that. I felt like we got along better than most bands we toured with and most people we knew. And at the same time, when you're that democratic and concerned with each other's opinions, you're always concerned with what the other people think.
I felt very proud to be part of a music scene that was changing the face of commercial music and rock music internationally, but I also felt like it was necessary for Soundgarden - as it was for all of these Seattle bands - to prove that we deserve to be on an international stage, and we weren't just part of a fad that was based on geography.
You can't always make out the words I sing with Soundgarden.
I can go from one extreme to another, from playing at the Sydney Opera House on the Songbook tour to shows with Soundgarden at Voodoo Fest, all in a week.
Whenever anyone sends me a link to a band, saying, 'These guys sound exactly like Soundgarden,' it's always some super simple sludge riff with a singer that sings high and screechy. And it's really awful.
When Soundgarden formed, we were post-punk - pretty quirky.
There are a handful of Soundgarden songs that work acoustically, but only a couple. It's not who we were.
Soundgarden signing to a major, then Mother Love Bone, and seeing the same happen to Alice in Chains. We were all suddenly making music and recording at the same time, and we had money to do it. It wasn't like a $2,000 recording that you do over a weekend. It's like, 'Wow, maybe this will be our job.'
There was no animosity in the breakup of Soundgarden.
The coolest thing for me to do was listen to Pearl Jam's 'Ten,' Nirvana's 'Nevermind,' or Soundgarden and play along to it and think about how awesome it would be to be in one of those bands and be up on stage. When I'd close my eyes at 13 and dream of being in Pearl Jam or one of those bands, it was exactly like how it is now with the band I'm in.
Coy Bowles
We never considered ourselves to be a good band or anything, we just thought we were playing for fun and we wanted to play music that sounded like Black Sabbath or Soundgarden or the music we were into at that time.
Daniel Johns
I'll never forget getting my first Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chain records, and hearing that wonderful, beautiful darkness. And the rhythmic intensity, that's what attracted me more than anything else.
David Draiman
There's a lot of spirituality and hope in our music that I think people are catching on to. It's not punk, it's not Green Day, not Offspring, not Soundgarden, not Stone Temple Pilots, not all of the other bands that are coming out.
Ed Kowalczyk
Unlike a lot of my cohorts from the '80s and '90s who totally blamed the shortness of their careers on bands like Nirvana and Alice in Chains and Soundgarden and whatever, I was very into a lot of those bands.
John Corabi
I love Soundgarden, I love Rage Against the Machine, Simon & Garfunkel.
Lee DeWyze
Soundgarden are good friends of mine.
Mark Lanegan
When I first went on tour with PJ in '98, I was still in shock having gone through the Soundgarden break up.
Matt Cameron
In my last band, Soundgarden, I had a couple of different drummers sit in on some stuff and it was fun for me to kind of take a break and watch the band.
Soundgarden are kind of the masters of writing songs that aren't pop cliches.
And if I'm honest about it, I was obsessed with Nirvana and Pearl Jam. This is like '92, right in the throes of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and Nirvana. I think I probably wanted to be Kurt Cobain.
We wrote many a Rage song where we'd use Soundgarden as a template.
