A title misheard on the news, whistled into a dictaphone
The guitar does not riff so much as droop, a phrase that bends in the heat and refuses to stand up straight. Chris Cornell’s voice enters already high, not straining, as if the melody had been rehearsed in a closed car. Black Hole Sun is pretty in a way that makes the prettiness suspect. The chorus asks a sky to wash the rain away, which is backwards, and the backwardsness is the whole climate. Nothing in the lyric offers a scene you could draw. The drawing happens in the tone: heavy, sweet, and sadder than the melody will admit.
Cornell wrote it in his head on the drive home from Bear Creek Studio in Woodinville, thirty-five or forty minutes out of Seattle, after a session that had nothing to do with this song. A news anchor had said something he heard wrong. Black hole sun, or so he thought, and the wrongness was good enough to keep. He turned the arrangement over in his skull so he would not lose it, solo included, got home, and whistled it into a dictaphone he never really played back. The next day he put key changes under the verse and let the words come as a stream off the feeling of the title. Soundgarden recorded it for Superunknown at Bad Animals in Seattle, Michael Beinhorn producing, Brendan O’Brien mixing. The album arrived in March 1994. Cornell told Kerrang! he had written the song in about fifteen minutes, and spent weeks on others that went nowhere.
Howard Greenhalgh’s video made the suburb melt, faces stretching, lawns too green, a picnic curdling into dream. It won the machinery of MTV and fixed a picture the lyric had declined to provide. Live, the band played it as a weight, Kim Thayil’s guitar finding the bend every night, Ben Shepherd and Matt Cameron keeping the floor from floating off. Cornell insisted, early, that people were missing the mood. The melody was pretty, so they heard cheer. He heard sad. He told Melody Maker in 1994 that nobody seemed to get it, which is a strange complaint for a song that became the one everyone got, and still a fair one.
I wrote it in my head driving home from Bear Creek Studio in Woodinville. It sparked from something a news anchor said on TV and I heard wrong. I heard blah blah blah black hole sun blah blah blah.
(Chris Cornell, Uncut, 2014)
The Grammy that followed, Best Hard Rock Performance, put a trophy on a mishearing. Cornell never claimed a program for the words. He called the lyric the closest he had come to playing with words for their own sake, a surreal dreamscape, not a thesis. That honesty is why the song does not date into a slogan. You cannot march to it. You can only stand in the drizzle it refuses to cancel, while the guitar keeps wilting in the same place.
What remains is the dictaphone hour, four in the morning, a title that was never said. Black Hole Sun is the sound of keeping a melody alive long enough to get it into a house. The house, and then the world, supplied meanings. The song had only supplied the weather.
