Nothing Compares 2 U
Chris Cornell recorded this song in 2007. Ten years later, he was gone.
I’m not going to write about Chris Cornell. I’ve tried four times. I keep deleting it. This is the fifth try, and the only way through is to write about the song and let him stand where he stands inside it.
Prince wrote this song. Sinéad made it famous. Chris made it unbearable.
I mean that word exactly. Not bad. Unbearable. There is a difference, and the difference is what the rest of this is about.
Start with what he had to work with. A voice that could fill stadiums. A voice that could scream through “Black Hole Sun” and roar through “Cochise.” Four octaves, and decades of knowing exactly how to make a song bigger, louder, more. The song had already lived two full lives before he touched it — the man who wrote it, the woman who made the world know it. He could have made it a third monument.
He did almost nothing. Acoustic guitar. Voice. Silence where the band should be. No production. No safety net. He sang it into the microphone like he was telling you a secret he shouldn’t.
“It’s been so lonely without you here.”
Here is the thing I keep running into, the reason for the deleted drafts.
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 — as if grief improves a recording, as if tragedy makes art better.
It doesn’t. It just makes it harder to hear.
But I can’t not hear it. That is the problem, stated plainly. Once you know how the story ends, the songs change, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. The cracks in his voice stop sounding like technique. They start sounding like evidence. The places where he reaches for the high notes and you can hear him straining — that stops sounding like performance and starts sounding like a man trying to hold something together.
I want to be careful here, because I don’t actually know what was happening in him when the tape rolled. Nobody listening does. What I know is what happens in me, every time: the recording arrives now with its ending attached, and I cannot detach it. 2007 on one side. Ten years on the other. The song sits in between and will not move.
“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. That’s all there is.
He could have filled that silence. He had the instrument for it and a career’s worth of knowing how. He chose not to. He chose to let the emptiness sit there, to let you feel how big the room was and how alone he was in it. Whatever else is unknowable about this recording, that choice is on the tape. The space is not an accident. He left it for you to sit in.
I don’t know why he made that choice. I don’t know why he made a lot of choices. The recording doesn’t answer that question, and I’m not going to answer it for him. A song is not a diary and a singer is not a defendant, and the worst thing I could do here is pretend the music gives me access to the man.
So I’ll only claim what I can witness. A man with everything a singer can have sat down with a guitar and stripped a famous song to almost nothing, and what was left was a loneliness so plain it has no place to hide. That was true the day he recorded it. It was true before anyone knew the ending. The ending didn’t put it there. The ending just took away my ability to hear anything else.
He recorded it in 2007. Ten years later, he was gone. Those are the only two facts I trust myself with, and the song hangs between them.
I can’t listen to this anymore.
I keep listening anyway.
