Guitar that bends and hangs
The guitar figure bends and hangs rather than riffing 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 that backwards request is the climate of the song. The lyric refuses a scene you could storyboard. The weight sits in the tone: heavy, sweet, and sadder than the melody admits on first pass.
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 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 barely played back. The next day he put key changes under the verse and let the words arrive as a stream off 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. It won MTV awards 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 steady. 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, 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 stand under rain the chorus refuses to cancel, while the guitar keeps bending in the same place.
What remains is the dictaphone hour: a title that was never said on the news. Black Hole Sun is the sound of keeping a melody alive long enough to get it into a house. The house, then the charts, then MTV supplied meanings. The song had only supplied the weather and the bend.
