Soundgarden released Badmotorfinger on October 8, 1991. Their third studio album was the first with bassist Ben Shepherd, whose arrival gave Chris Cornell, Kim Thayil and Matt Cameron another songwriter to work with as they developed a largely new set of material.
Shepherd’s influence reached beyond the bass parts. He wrote “Somewhere” and shared the music credit for “Slaves & Bulldozers” with Cornell, while “Jesus Christ Pose” credited all four members for its music. Looking back in a 2021 Guitar World interview, Thayil described Shepherd as the album’s defining presence. “Ben’s sparks rubbed off on the rest of us,” he said. The change also meant working without the usual audience feedback: much of the material developed in rehearsals and the studio instead of being refined through repeated club performances.
Cornell’s “Rusty Cage” showed how far they could push a song’s arrangement. Its opening guitar sound came from using a wah pedal as a filter, a character Thayil remembered hearing on Cornell’s demo. The band kept the tightly connected bass and rhythm-guitar parts largely intact and decided against adding a guitar solo. The song already moved through enough distinct sections to hold their attention. Rather than interrupting that movement for a conventional lead break, they let the changing riffs carry it.
To record the new lineup, Soundgarden returned to Terry Date, who had worked with them on Louder Than Love. Much of the basic tracking took place at Studio D in Sausalito, California, where the room’s layout required a practical adjustment. Date told Tape Op in 2018 that Cameron played in the main room with Shepherd and Thayil, their amplifiers isolated from the drums. Cornell joined Date in the control room, singing and playing along with the band. His voice was powerful enough that putting him beside Cameron would have sent it into the drum microphones.
The work continued at Bear Creek in Washington, where the band recorded guitars and vocals. In SPIN’s 2021 oral history, Date recalled that Cornell sometimes needed to stop a vocal session because the demanding high parts would not come that day. Cameron remembered Cornell finding vocal lines for music that initially seemed almost impossible to sing over. He singled out “Drawing Flies,” a song Cameron composed, as an example of Cornell turning a difficult instrumental idea into a finished song.
That flexibility also shaped the guitars. Discussing “Outshined” with Total Guitar in 2021, Thayil explained that he liked playing slightly behind the beat, with Cameron adjusting the groove around him. He also described a preference for layering separate guitar performances that did not line up perfectly. The small differences between takes created movement he preferred to the regular sweep of an effect. Those choices left room for the musicians’ individual timing and touch within the heavy arrangements.
The finished album earned a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance, and Soundgarden took the material into markedly different rooms. They opened for Guns N’ Roses while continuing to play their own shows between support dates. Cameron told SPIN that those smaller performances let them watch their audience grow. The following year, Soundgarden joined Lollapalooza, a tour Cameron identified as the point when the group fully developed its strength as a live band.
