Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil recently spoke to SeattleWeekly.com about the band's forthcoming new album, their first since 1996's Down on the Upside. An excerpt from the chat follows.
"There's no timeline, except that our target — roughly — is early 2012," said Thayil of the album's expected date of completion. "We are focused on this tour and these shows and we have a few dates in October, but in the interim, we'll do some studio work. We have a few more guitars to do and some vocals. And some of the songs are still being arranged. We want to make sure it's absolutely the most satisfying for us, and put the best foot forward that we can put. I would assume our fans will also get into it then."
On how the band's songwriting process has changed over the years, Thayil had this to say: "It's actually not much different, because we really didn't have a set way we wrote in the past. The only thing that might have been consistent is a band member being a complete author — meaning words and music — which Chris [Cornell, vocals/guitar] did a lot of. But even if Chris writes a complete song, or Ben [Shepherd, bass] writes a complete song . . . sometimes we wrote a song as a jam. All the different combinations were always there; there was never a set thing like 'Jagger/Richards,' you know?"
Josh Hart is a former web producer and staff writer for Guitar World and Guitar Aficionado magazines (2010–2012). He has since pursued writing fiction under various pseudonyms while exploring the technical underpinnings of journalism, now serving as a senior software engineer for The Seattle Times.
