Soundgarden B-Sides Collection on the Way?

No matter how much Chris Cornell tours to promote his pop-friendly solo album Scream, journalists just keep asking him about Soundgarden and when they might get back together. Rolling Stone was the latest to pester Cornell about the possibility, but although he said nothing concrete about a reunion, he did acknowledge that the band members have discussed releasing a B-sides collection.

“This is something we first talked about 10 years ago,” Cornell said. “We all feel it’s time to do that, and we have a lot of fans out there, and we have a lot of new fans discovering our music, and I think the catalog and the legacy of the band has been ignored by the record label and previous management, so we decided to get together, and start working towards putting something like that out.”

This collection might be an album or a whole box set, although nothing has been hashed out definitively yet. Soundgarden’s last studio album, Down on the Upside, came out in 1996 with a greatest-hits compilation, A-Sides, following a year later. The band broke up in 1997, but with peers like Jane’s Addiction and Stone Temple Pilots recently reforming, is Cornell tempted? “It takes somebody to really stand up and say, ‘We should do this, we have to go do this, let’s go do this,’” he said about reuniting, “and so far, no one has raised their hand to do that. Still, it’s not impossible.”

Photo courtesy A&M.