My iPod #247: Soundgarden - The Day I Tried to Live

"The Day I Tried to Live" is a track, and also was a single, from Soundgarden's album "Superunknown", which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The band plan to reissue the whole album along with b-sides, outtakes and some cool t-shirts. You can pre-order the bundle here!

The song is another one of those which I heard for the first time when its video (above) appeared on MTV2. I liked it from that moment on. The descending bass riff at the beginning and its weird time signature (it changes from 7/4 to 4/4 throughout) was what caught my attention. The song also showed me how amazing Chris Cornell actually is as a vocalist. "Cochise", "Black Hole Sun", "Original Fire" - all those sung by him were some tracks that I'd seen on the TV before "The Day", but they never exhibited the range the man possesses. At some point in "The Day", Cornell's sings in a low register before screaming like a banshee in a split second. All in what is probably one take too. It is incredible.

Apparently, people have taken this track to be something of a suicide kind of thing, but Cornell stated that it is simply about getting out of the house and doing normal things instead of being a recluse. It is meant to be optimistic. He said so here almost twenty years ago. I will continue to listen to it with that mindset.

My iPod #103: Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun

This may be a short post. I'm not really a fan of Soundgarden, so I don't know if I'll be able to say a lot about them. I did download "Superunknown" last year though, thought that was awesome and listened to a few songs of theirs afterwards. But I'll try and fill the void.

"Black Hole Sun" was actually the third single from "Superunknown". Huh. I always assumed it was the first, only because it's considered to be the band's most popular song. Grunge was still the big thing in America at the time the song was released, but Kurt Cobain was dead too. So the grunge followers needed a song that would reflect the feelings. This eventually became that song.

I watched Kerrang! one day, and the video for "Black Hole Sun" came on. I was pretty weirded out by the whole thing. The whole apocalypse theme, the weird stretching faces... pure nightmare fuel for anybody. 'Cause of that, I didn't really like the song. I didn't want to see the video again for quite some time either. I realised the song wasn't bad though. I can't make my mind up on whether the song has a positive mood or a negative one. Stereotypically, grunge never has a positive message. There's no negative theme in the song, it's just about who observes problems around them, and yearns for something to 'wash the rain away'. Maybe it's the drop D tuning that does it. Makes the track sound dark and moody.

Until tomorrow.

Jamie.