Nothing Compares 2 U

I’m not going to write about Chris Cornell.

I’ve tried four times. I keep deleting it.

Prince wrote this song. Sinéad made it famous. Chris made it unbearable.

Not bad. Unbearable. There’s a difference.

He stripped everything away. No production. No safety net. Just that voice—the one that could fill stadiums, that could scream through “Black Hole Sun” and roar through “Cochise”—whispering into a microphone like he was telling you a secret he shouldn’t.

“It’s been so lonely without you here.”

He recorded this in 2007. Ten years later, he was gone.

I don’t want to write about that. I don’t want to make his death into content. I don’t want to be the guy who says “listen to how sad this is now that he’s dead,” like grief is some kind of value-add, like tragedy makes art better.

It doesn’t. It just makes it harder to hear.

But I can’t not hear it. That’s the problem. Once you know how the story ends, the songs change. The cracks in his voice aren’t technique anymore. They’re evidence. The moments where he reaches for the high notes and you can hear him straining—that’s not performance. That’s a man trying to hold something together.

“All the flowers that you planted, mama, in the backyard, all died when you went away.”

Four minutes and thirty-four seconds. Acoustic guitar. Voice. Silence where the band should be.

He could have filled that silence. He had four octaves. He had decades of knowing exactly how to make a song bigger, louder, more. He chose not to. He chose to let the emptiness sit there, let you feel how big the room was, how alone he was in it.

I don’t know why he made that choice. I don’t know why he made a lot of choices.

I just know I can’t listen to this anymore.

And I keep listening anyway.