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about

I went through a phase where I decided I stopped liking Soundgarden sometime after high school. I'm not sure why - certainly part of it was anxiety of past influence creeping up on new identities I was trying on in college and beyond, a long winded way of saying I wanted to look cool to my new indie friends. I think the fact that, of all the bands that teethed me in junior high and beyond, Soundgarden seemed less edgy, more beloved of a certain macho segment of the rock audience who were less interested in the band's artier side and were instead looking for a seamless transition from, say, Foreigner to Creed. Even Alice in Chains had songs explicitly about heroin. Chris Cornell wrote explicitly about self-loathing and suicidal ideation - things that were always close to my thinking and, so, must be abjured.

It was idiotic, and now Cornell is gone, with no way to apologize or to thank him. So to mourn him (and the 22 young souls who lost their lives attending a British pop concert, an event weighing heavily on me this week) I dusted this cover off and decided to do it properly. I performed on ukulele a lot in coffeehouses around NJ circa 2011. "Fourth of July" was an appropriately challenging song to arrange for the instrument. I was keeping with the trend of performing heavy (or, anway, loud) material and presenting it in a new context, but my hope was to avoid lazy ironicism (and its signification of, somehow, hilarity). But, as ever, I got the idea from Cornell himself, who did a similarly stripped down version on one of his tours. It highlighted the incredible harmonic structure of the piece, and goddamnit any man who can make a song this fundamentally pretty into the trippiest, heaviest thing to come out of early nineties Seattle was never someone to turn your nose up at. I recommend seeking that out. But I think I did okay here.

In addition to Chris and the people of Manchester, I'd like to dedicate this to Jim Chorman, forever my brother in grunge fandom, and the incredible tunings that changed our music forever.

credits

from Promises, Promises (or, Edible Feedback), track released May 26, 2017
Words and Music by Chris Cornell. All rights reserved. Recorded May 22-25 at Cuck Shed, Chicago IL. This is a homemade digital recording. A splendid time is guaranteed for someone.

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