album cover photo by Randee St. Nicholas

What do you remember about first being introduced to the idea of Chris Cornell’s Euphoria Morning and being a part of it? Can you tell the story on how it came to be for you?

I first heard Chris Cornell and Soundgarden demo’s in the late 80’s. My friend Aaron Jacoves ended up introducing me to them. Eleven’s first album had just come out and we were listening to a lot of BadMotorFinger. We were on tour at a truck stop somewhere and Soundgarden happened to be at the same truck stop. We got to talking and they asked us to open up for them. So, Eleven opened for Soundgarden and then Natasha played on “Fresh Tendrils”. They would send us their albums right when they finished them, and we would help with some of the promotional stuff. We toured together again on their last Down on the Upside tour and when Soundgarden broke up for a while, Chris came and stayed with us.

We had just moved into this house in Los Angeles. We didn’t have a proper studio yet, it was just a little gear, but we would just get together in the house and do some writing. “Sunshower” was written around that time and that’s also when we did “Ava Maria”. Chris then invited the president of A&M records to come over and listen to our stuff. At the time, I was writing a bunch of songs for a publishing deal where I had to turn in this material. A&M then offered us a record deal and in a very ballsy way, Natasha and I asked for a budget to buy gear for our home studio. We recorded our fourth album Avantgardedog, using all of that equipment. The house had turned into a super-pro studio. Chris wanted to stay around, and he started preparing songs that would become his solo album. Daniel Lanois was lined up to produce it. We worked on songs with Chris like, “Mission”, “Pillow of Your Bones” and “Disappearing One” – Natasha would help Chris with the arrangement and harmonic changes. After some demos, Chris was ready and was supposed to go off with Daniel to make the record. All of a sudden Daniel’s people called and said he was taking a break and canceling all of his projects – this was two days before they were supposed to start. Chris turned to us and said, “Now, what the fuck am I going to do?” Natasha suggested, we do it ourselves, we have all this equipment now so let’s get started. We basically worked in secret, recording at the house and would invite certain people over like Josh Freese, Jason Falkner, Matt Cameron and Ric Markmann. Chris was living in our guest room and we had the most chill, creative and no-pressure environment I can ever remember. Some days we didn’t feel like working so we would go to the movies or the beach. Or sometimes in the middle of a day off Chris would have an idea so we would fire up the studio. This went on for seven months, but Chris would go home to Seattle at times for a week or two in-between. Once we had the recording complete, Chris went out and told everybody, “By the way I did this recording, and my solo record is done.” Chris really trusted us because we had this connection.

Afterwards, there was a tour lined up and it had to be us (Eleven) as his band. We prepared for a few months and then Chris came back down two weeks before the tour started to rehearse as a complete group. And that was it – then we hit the road on the Euphoria Morning tour for a little under a year.

Was Cornell’s intent always to write a solo record at this time, or was it more a result of being together and having these songs written?

I think he always had a solo record in mind in terms of what to do next. There were a few songs he already had written, and we’d help rearranging a few things. Chris had completed “Sweet Euphoria” and recorded it at his house. He expected the record to be more acoustic-based and then once we all started working on stuff together it was realized that it could be something that was quite different from Soundgarden, it wouldn’t necessarily be compared, but it would have sides where you can explore the writing and parts of his voice that contained more R & B in a way. Like the vocals in “When I’m Down” or “Disappearing One” for example. It was very much an organic get together where none of us knew what it was going to be. Chris had a bunch of songs, but he needed more so we just wrote together and things like “Follow My Way” would come out of it. A song like that was very much a cross-pollination of our visions. Chris gave Natasha a lot of freedom to play around with the harmonics and chord changes to really enhance the songs. We forged this amazing trio where we had such a fun time creating. We’d spend five hours finding the right guitar tone because we could. Natasha would be like, “How many more amps do I need to listen to? Can you just play the part already?” It was worth it in the end. Nothing sounds over-thought, it all just sounds like the right atmosphere for the song.