It was a sudden loud thump that changed things. Up until that moment, Chris Cornell had spent the day working on a demo in his home’s basement. He had a song brewing, but the words were eluding him as he went to investigate the strange noise upstairs. There Chris spied its grim source through a window: a female robin in its death throes. Unable to draw breath, its neck was broken after flying into the glass. Moved by the sight of its writhing body, Chris euthanised the stricken bird with a nearby cinder block and buried its remains in his garden. When he returned to his basement, words started to come. ‘Heard it from another room,’ he sang over a near 10-minute discordant jangle – his piercing voice strangely dimmed. ‘Dazed out in a garden...
