Chris Cornell released Songbook on November 21, 2011. His first solo live album drew on the acoustic tour he had taken through the United States and Canada earlier that year, gathering songs from Soundgarden, Audioslave, Temple of the Dog and his solo records. Music made with different bands and different arrangements could share a set because Cornell was approaching it all as the person who had helped write it.
The idea had roots well before that tour. In a 2011 interview with SPIN, Cornell recalled how “Seasons” and his acoustic recording of “Like Suicide” had led listeners to expect an acoustic solo album. His debut, Euphoria Morning, took another direction, but he still wanted to explore that format. When he selected performances for Songbook, capturing what had happened in the room mattered more than eliminating every mistake. Wrong chords could stay. “It was all about feeling and sounding just like it did in real life,” he said.
Playing alone had become more comfortable through experience. Cornell told Spinner in 2011 that his acoustic interludes during Audioslave shows had expanded from a single song into longer passages. On his solo tour, audience requests began steering the evenings, and he often departed from the set list. That interaction helped persuade him to make a record of the shows.
It also helped keep “Cleaning My Gun” in circulation. Cornell had performed the song without finding an album for it, continuing to play it because listeners responded. Songbook finally gave it an album release. Its inclusion put a song that had developed a life onstage alongside material listeners already knew from his studio catalog.
The original 16-track sequence opened with “As Hope and Promise Fade,” which had appeared on Scream as the hidden track “Two Drink Minimum.” That album also supplied “Ground Zero.” Material from his 2009 studio release joined older songs such as Soundgarden’s “Fell on Black Days” and Temple of the Dog’s “Call Me a Dog.” The selection reached across the different production approaches of those records, giving Cornell room to reconsider how the songs worked with voice and acoustic guitar.
The closing track, “The Keeper,” was a studio recording written for the film Machine Gun Preacher. It gave the album another connection to Cornell’s work outside his bands. He had read the screenplay and spoken with the director before finding a way into the song, imagining the film’s central character making a commitment to the children he protected. The writing assignment was specific, but it belonged beside the acoustic performances that preceded it.
The tours also gave Cornell a direction for new solo material. His 2015 studio album Higher Truth grew from that experience, with songs written to give the acoustic shows a future beyond revisiting his catalog. In his Music & Musicians interview, published online in 2017, Cornell explained how the format had clarified his sense of himself as a performer: “As a solo artist, I don’t think I had an identity until I started doing the Songbook touring.”
