I think we all carry a depressive streak in us but most people just hide it. A lot of people think that entertainment has to be something loud, cheer… - Chris Cornell

That Guns N' Roses video, the one with the dolphins in it ["Estranged"]. A big chunk of the video is Axl [Rose] coming out of this huge mansion on a hill with a bunch of servants wearing white and him getting into this huge stretch and having a motorcade of police wearing white ice-cream-salesman suits. Who the f--- does he think he is going to honestly connect with besides Donald Trump? Who else is going to give a shit about the fact that he can afford that kind of attention? It goes beyond decadence; it's spitting in the face of the people that have put you there. I was offended by it, and I don't get offended by much.

Don't drink. And that's serious. For me, that's one, because I never wrote, I was never creative while drinking, and there were these periods of not drinking and just kind of white-knuckling it and writing and recording, and then drinking a lot and coming into the studio hung over and being in the studio drunk and never being able to do anything to the level or to the degree that I thought that I should be. I'm proud of everything that I did, but I think it was a lot more difficult than it needed to be.

There's always a sense of camaraderie between bands. The only thing that I ever remember that starts to go outside of the normal healthy competition was when Kurt [Cobain] was slamming Pearl Jam. Once you get outside of your local little scene, lot of cases, writers will bait you and lead you down that path as cunningly as they can. I've seen it happen dozens of times. I've had people say, "Well, so-and-so said this about you, what do you say about that?" And they might be misquoting them, or maybe that's not what that person meant, or maybe that person was just in a bad mood. It's provoked out of you. They'll get you in a position where you start firing and they'll throw out little things about different people. But everyone that anyone would know as a successful Seattle band, or even an integral part of the scene, are all friends. Always have been.