A certain scenario kept repeating itself. The people from the magazines would take two or three shots of the band. They’d start to pack up. And then … - Chris Cornell

When you write your own lyrics, you tend to be over-analytical. One second everything you do is brilliant, and the next, everything is garbage, and I want to be able to express personal things without being made to feel stupid. One of the first times I remember writing something personal was on tour. I was feeling really freaky and down, and I looked in the mirror and I was wearing a red T-shirt and some baggy tennis shorts. I remember thinking that as bummed as I felt, I looked like some beach kid. And then I came up with that line—’I’m looking California / And feeling Minnesota,’ from the song ‘Outshined’—and as soon as I wrote it down, I thought it was the dumbest thing. But after the record came out and we went on tour, everybody would be screaming along with that particular line when it came up in the song. The was a shock. How could anyone know that that was one of the most personally specific things I had ever written? It was just a tiny line. But somehow, maybe because it was personal, it just pushed that button.

I just read some quotes where Dave Grohl is talking about the Foo Fighters taking a hiatus of an undetermined length, saying, 'I want to be in this band forever, and that's why we need to take a break.' That's perfectly described. Did we need to split up and tell the world and the fans we're splitting up? Probably not. It was time to take a breather from the business.

I don’t know if you can ever take him [ Andrew Wood ] out of [my heart and soul]. There was a period of time when he would sit in his bedroom across the hall from mine and we would kind of have these dueling four-track demos and songs. He wasn’t doing it for Malfunkshun and me doing it for Soundgarden; it had nothing to do with that. It was us just having fun. Maybe you can look at it as songwriting exercises? We were always kind of neck and neck. We were very different from each other in terms of our approach. He was very free and didn’t necessarily have a critical voice while he was in the process of writing a song. He would just do anything. I on the other hand, not only do I have a critical voice, I have sort of an editorial staff and what that creates is something kind of completely different.