

But because the melody is really pretty, everyone thinks it’s almost chipper, which is ridiculous.”

He continued, “No one seems to get this, but ‘Black Hole Sun’ is sad. I was just sucked in by the music and I was painting a picture with the lyrics. Other than that, I sure didn’t have an understanding of it after I wrote it. The chorus lyric is kind of beautiful and easy to remember. In another interview, he added, “It’s funny because hits are usually sort of congruent, sort of an identifiable lyric idea, and that song pretty much had none. I guess it worked for a lot of people who heard it, but I have no idea how you’d begin to take that one literally.” Of the meaning behind the song’s lyrics, Cornell has said, “It’s just sort of a surreal dreamscape, a weird, play-with-the-title kind of song.Ĭornell added, “lyrically it’s probably the closest to me just playing with words for words’ sake, of anything I’ve written. What in the world is this? I get goosebumps thinking about it now.” From the very first few notes, I felt like I’d been hit by a thunderbolt. Said Beinhorn of the single, “I think for the rest of my entire life until I draw my last breath, I’ll never ever forget how I felt when they started playing that song. Michael Beinhorn and Brendan O’Brien produced and recorded the track. Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron is noted as calling the track “a huge departure.” It was the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. It ended up changing the song completely.”Īdded Thayil, the song “wasn’t safe as milk, but it wasn’t glass in someone’s eye either. He later added, “I wrote the song thinking the band wouldn’t like it-then it became the biggest hit of the summer.”Ĭornell also noted that he came up with the song while using a Leslie speaker and Soundgarden lead guitarist Kim Thayil said the speaker was an excellent choice as it is “very Beatlesque and has a distinctive sound. Then I wrote the lyrics and that was similar, a stream of consciousness based on the feeling I got from the chorus and title.” The next day I brought it into the real world, assigning a couple of key changes in the verse to make the melodies more interesting. I got home and whistled it into a Dictaphone. I spent a lot of time spinning those melodies in my head so I wouldn’t forget them. “It all came together, pretty much the whole arrangement including the guitar solo that’s played beneath the riff. I thought that would make an amazing song title, but what would it sound like? I heard ‘blah blah blah black hole sun blah blah blah’.
#Blackhole sun lyrics tv
It sparked from something a news anchor said on TV and I heard wrong. Said Cornell of the song’s writing and meaning in a 2014 interview with Uncut Magazine, “I wrote it in my head driving home from Bear Creek Studio in Woodinville, a 35–40 minute drive from Seattle. It was also top-10 in Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, and Iceland. 1, and later that year finished as the top rock track of 1994, according to the Billboard charts. It topped the Billboard rock tracks chart, where it spent seven weeks at No. The song was released in 1994, the third single from the band’s fourth studio album, Superunknown. “Black Hole Sun” was originally written by Soundgarden’s lead singer and frontman, Chris Cornell, in his car as he was driving home one night in the Emerald City.

The band’s most famous cut came a handful of years after debuted nationally and that song, “Black Hole Sun,” and its meaning are the subject of our inquiry here. While there are several big bands associated with the grunge movement in Seattle, it was Soundgarden that was first to make a name for itself on the national stage in the late 1980s, ahead of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and others.
