Chris Cornell

There's sadness to anyone that dies before their time, and specifically ones that seem to affect people in a positive way. It doesn't matter if it's Whitney Houston or a nameless, faceless person on the street. That's just as big of a tragedy for me. ”

When I was eight, my piano teacher played seven or eight notes, and I sang them. She stopped and looked at me in shock! That was the first time I'd gotten that reaction. I'd had looks of horror, but never shock in a positive way. ”

I was going to be a musician, no matter what it took. I supported myself with blue-collared jobs so I could write music and be in a band and play shows. I even got into an underground art scene. I was going to do whatever. ”

When all of a sudden you're successful and sought after overnight, you are instantly opened to a lot of sides of humanity that the average person is never going to see. And those can often be pretty disheartening, and it can make somebody pretty lonely. ”

Definitely, when you get into something where bands are playing for 30,000 people, it's not like the post-punk, U.S. independent scene. ”

A true musician, like Johnny Cash, should be able to walk into a room with nothing but an instrument and capture people's attention for two hours. ”

There's something about that blind trust between Timbaland and me - two people that have almost nothing in common except for a love of music - that is really rejuvenating. ”

I think back to my childhood, and I remember running around as a kid. We were all running around then. It wasn't about getting into shape. It's just what we did. ”

The focus on my wife and my children, it really helps me make sense of the music side of it somehow. ”

As a child, I was this record collector/listener that would sit in a room and listen to the entire Beatles catalog alone, over and over and over again. ”