It will now be hard to avoid another “morbid exchange” on the occasion of Cornell’s death at age 52, though it’s worth trying to not make it too morbid: There was powerful light as well as darkness in his catalogue, and Cornell as much as any singer saw how pain and uplift could intertwine. Regardless, he now inevitably will be included in the upsetting list of grunge stars who’ve died unexpectedly—Wood, Cobain, Staley, Weiland, among others. Cornell performed in Detroit on Wednesday night and by morning was dead in what the medical examiner has ruled a suicide.

When Soundgarden first emerged, Cornell’s stunning, high wail and his band’s heaving, blues-inflected odysseys brought them comparisons to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Cornell said in ’94 that those bands didn’t interest him “even slightly”; his insistence about that softened later, and the final song of his final concert, “Slaves and Bulldozers,” featured a snippet from Led Zeppelin’s “In My Time of Dying.” In any case, his full career proved his eclecticism, with his work ranging from acoustic singer/songwriter material to an amazing Michael Jackson cover to a bizarre 2009 dance album with Timbaland. About the latter effort, which earned him scathing reviews, he told The Guardian, “To me R&B means Aretha Franklin, who is otherworldly.” Franklin, as much as anyone, is a good reference point for the abandon, hurt, and hope in Cornell’s voice.

As a songwriter he had an impressionistic, literary bent: Soundgarden’s biggest smash, “Black Hole Sun,” painted a vivid dreamscape that, he said, was mostly just “words for words’ sake.” He could be an acidic cultural critic, too, with the early single “Big Dumb Sex” crassly sending up love songs (chorus: “I’m gonna fuck / fuck / fuck / fuck you”) and the searing, twitchy “Jesus Christ Pose” mocking other rockers for faux-blasphemous posing. Still, Cornell never quite felt he got his due as a poet; after Johnny Cash covered “Rusty Cage” (featuring perfect coinages like “It’s gonna be too dark to sleep again”), he recalled, “People were leaving messages on my answering machine telling me how great the lyrics were and they didn’t say that about the lyrics when it was the Soundgarden version.”

That his words could be so easily overlooked has something to do with the weight of the cultural narratives around grunge. Fairly or not, he was heard through a filter of fatalism. “The Day I Tried to Live” was often perceived as a song about drugs, but Cornell insisted it was actually “a hopeful song” about attempting to thrive in the face of antisocial impulses—even if doing so meant “wallowing in the blood and mud / with all the other pigs.” A sense of justice underlay much of his work, and indeed, Cornell deserves recognition as a fine protest singer. “Hunger Strike,” the keening ballad he sang with Eddie Vedder as part of the band Temple of the Dog, is as forthright a call to consciousness and equality as you get: “I don’t mind stealin’ bread from the mouths of decadence / But I can’t feed on the powerless when my cup’s already overfilled.”