Nothing Compares 2 U

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

Prince wrote that line. Sinéad made the world know it. Chris Cornell recorded it in 2007 with an acoustic guitar and almost nothing else, and ten years later he was gone. There is no honest way for me to hear the recording without knowing that.

I’ve tried to write about Chris Cornell 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.

Start with what he had to work with. A voice that could fill stadiums — the one that screamed through “Black Hole Sun” and roared 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, and he could have made it a third monument. He did almost nothing instead. 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.

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. 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 and start sounding like evidence. The places where he reaches for the high notes and you can hear him straining stop sounding like performance and start sounding like a man trying to hold something together.

I want to be careful, because I don’t know what was happening in him when the tape rolled. Nobody listening does. 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. What I can witness is this: 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. It’s been so lonely without you here. That was true the day he recorded it, before anyone knew the ending. The ending didn’t put it there. The ending just took away my ability to hear anything else.

Four minutes and thirty-four seconds. He could have filled that silence — he had the instrument for it and a career’s worth of knowing how — and he chose to let the emptiness sit there instead, 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.

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.

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