It's definitely a different world. Smoking is bad for your voice, for sure, but you learn to function in that world of bad. Now I'm in better shape, … - Chris Cornell

Not really. I don't even have enough time to pursue everything I want to do musically. Also, there's a lot of people out there who spend a lot of time trying to act, so I think most of the good acting jobs should be reserved for those people.

It’s that weird magic of if you sing a song you’re connecting to emotionally, it's going to trick me into feeling my emotions. I'm not feeling your [pain], I don't know what happened to you, but you have just tricked me into feeling my own pain and my own emotions and that is an amazing thing. That's this miraculous thing about music. Film can do it too, art can do it, but music does it great. That’s where making an album like this ['Higher Truth'] is exciting and special. The downside is you pretty much have to do it on every song. You don’t get a free pass unless you write a joke song, which I'm not good at. If I wrote like the [Beatles’] ballad ‘Rocky Raccoon’ or something I could get away from it for a second. A song about a raccoon that gets in a gun fight.

Well, we haven't had what I would understand as the sort of sudden pressure that seems to screw a lot of people up. We've been under pressure for years. Most of the bands I can think of that have had severe problems with success pretty much had their first or second album go over the top, commercial success like we haven't even seen. And for me personally, and to a degree the rest of the band, none of us are really super social in particular. So we're not in situations on a daily basis where being somebody that's famous is going to become really annoying, or you can't go anywhere because everyone recognizes you. I don't go out too much anyway, 'cause I've never really liked crowds or been that comfortable around a lot of people. In that case, I've been really lucky.