Audioslave premiered their debut single “Cochise” online through Yahoo’s LAUNCH on September 25, 2002. It introduced the band ahead of their first album, pairing Chris Cornell’s voice with the guitar, bass and drums of Tom Morello, Tim Commerford and Brad Wilk.
Producer Rick Rubin had suggested that the three Rage Against the Machine musicians try playing with the former Soundgarden singer. What followed was a writing process built around the four musicians working together. On an interview disc accompanying the debut, later excerpted by Double J, Cornell recalled that most of the songs were written with everyone in the room. It was an approach he had not experienced so consistently since Soundgarden’s early days, and he described the new partnership as unusually easy and productive.
For Morello, the change also meant choosing a different instrument. He told Rock Sound in 2024 that he began playing a Stratocaster when Audioslave formed, marking it with the words “SOUL POWER.” Working with Cornell opened up a different relationship between guitar and vocal melody. The same writing sessions could produce the riffs of “Cochise” and “Show Me How to Live” alongside the more spacious arrangements of “Like a Stone” and “I Am the Highway.”
The opening of “Cochise” reached further back into Morello’s experiments. In his MasterClass guitar lesson, he traced the idea to helicopters flying over his Los Angeles apartment during the early 1990s. He tried to reproduce their sound with his guitar, combining a very short delay with a DigiTech Whammy pedal. He muted the strings and struck them rhythmically, letting the delay repeat the pulses while the pedal shifted the pitch. Moving it back and forth suggested a helicopter approaching or receding. That experiment eventually became the single’s introduction, before the full band enters with its central riff.
Morello also linked the title to the music’s force. In the band’s 2002 album announcement, he described Native American leader Cochise’s resistance to the U.S. Cavalry and the fury of his response. “This song kinda sounds like that,” he said, explaining the connection between the historical figure and the track.
For the music video, director Mark Romanek initially proposed a violent performance scene. Wilk told Modern Drummer that the concept involved the band performing while bullets struck them, ending with all four musicians dead. The group passed on it, doubting the finished video would get shown. Romanek’s next idea was to light the performance entirely with fireworks.
That choice had consequences on set. Wilk recalled being nervous because the scale of the pyrotechnics allowed only a few attempts. “I have cymbals that are just torched from flame balls falling on them,” he told the magazine. He also reported burns on his back.
The single arrived after rough rehearsal demos had circulated online during the album’s writing and recording. The finished Audioslave, recorded with Rubin at Ocean Way Studios in Los Angeles, followed in November 2002. “Cochise” occupied the opening slot on its 14 song track list, giving the full album the same starting point as the band’s official introduction.
