The riff that opens Badmotorfinger was made by jamming a wah pedal into its lowest position and using it as a filter, until Kim Thayil's guitar on "Rusty Cage" came out sounding, in his own words, as if it were running backward. That single decision, a typically perverse Soundgarden solution to a problem nobody else would have thought to set themselves, tells you almost everything about the band's third album: heavy enough for the metal crowd, but built by four men who treated odd time signatures, detuned strings and studio sleight of hand as the entire point.
Released in October 1991, Badmotorfinger was Soundgarden's first record with bassist Ben Shepherd and the one that turned the Seattle quartet from underground favourites into a stadium-filling proposition. It landed in the same astonishing six-week stretch as Nirvana's Nevermind, Pearl Jam's Ten and Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik, was briefly buried beneath all three, then rode the wave they created to two million American sales, a Grammy nomination, a video MTV would not show, and a permanent place near the top of every grunge list written since.
Album Facts
Soundgarden had spent the late 1980s being filed, lazily, under heavy metal by people who had not listened closely. Badmotorfinger was the record that made the filing impossible, a dense and deliberately difficult album that fused Black Sabbath's weight with the art-punk twitch of Gang of Four and the off-kilter pulse of the Melvins. Here is the record at a glance before the story behind it.
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Soundgarden |
| Album | Badmotorfinger |
| Release Date | 8 October 1991 |
| Label | A&M Records |
| Producer(s) | Terry Date and Soundgarden |
| Studio(s) | Studio D (Sausalito), Bear Creek Studios (Woodinville, WA), A&M Studios (Hollywood) |
| Genre / Subgenre | Grunge, alternative metal, heavy metal, hard rock |
| Track Count | 12 |
| Total Runtime | 57:42 |
| Billboard 200 Peak | No. 39 (29 February 1992) |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | No. 39 |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | Australia No. 54, Canada No. 50, New Zealand No. 16 |
| Certifications | US 2x Platinum (RIAA), Canada Platinum, New Zealand Platinum, UK Gold, Australia Gold |
| Estimated Sales | More than 2 million in the US |
| Key Singles | "Jesus Christ Pose", "Outshined", "Rusty Cage" |
Cultural Context: The Autumn Everything Changed
To understand Badmotorfinger you have to understand the few weeks on either side of it. The autumn of 1991 was the moment American underground rock detonated into the mainstream, and Soundgarden were standing almost exactly at the centre of the blast radius. Pearl Jam's Ten had crept out in late August. On 24 September, Nirvana's Nevermind and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik arrived on the same day. Metallica's black album had landed in August and was busy selling to everyone. Guns N' Roses had dropped both volumes of Use Your Illusion a fortnight before Soundgarden's record.
Into that crush came Badmotorfinger on 8 October, a fortnight late after A&M pushed the date back from 24 September citing production problems. For a few weeks it was overshadowed, most obviously by Nevermind, which was about to become the defining album of a decade. Yet the same surge that buried Soundgarden also lifted them. As grunge became the most marketable word in American music, a record that had been built with none of Nevermind's pop instincts found itself selling to a vastly larger audience than the band had ever reached before.
Beyond the record shops, the world was tilting too. The Gulf War had been fought and won in the early months of the year. The Soviet Union was dissolving in real time and would formally cease to exist by Christmas. A new thing called the World Wide Web had quietly gone live. It was a year of endings and beginnings, and Badmotorfinger, a heavy, questioning, cynical record about conflict with the self and the system, fitted the mood like a glove.
The Band's Story Up to This Point
Soundgarden formed in Seattle in 1984, named after a pipe sculpture called A Sound Garden that sat in the city's Magnuson Park and moaned when the wind blew through it. The original trio was Chris Cornell on drums and vocals, Hiro Yamamoto on bass and Kim Thayil on guitar. When Scott Sundquist joined on drums in 1985, Cornell moved out front to sing full time, and when Sundquist left the following year he was replaced by Matt Cameron, a Skin Yard alumnus who would become one of the most admired drummers of his generation.
They were early and important pieces of the Seattle scene. Susan Silver, Cornell's then-girlfriend and future wife, began managing them in 1986. They put out their first records through Sub Pop, the "Hunted Down" single and the Screaming Life EP in 1987, the Fopp EP in 1988, before releasing the debut album Ultramega OK on SST in 1988, a record that earned a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance. Then they did something none of their peers had yet dared to do.
- In mid-1988 Soundgarden signed to A&M, becoming the first grunge band to sign with a major label.
- Louder Than Love followed in September 1989, the first Soundgarden album to reach the Billboard 200 and the first grunge album to chart there at all.
- Yamamoto, tired of touring and wanting to return to study, left in 1989. Jason Everman, recently of Nirvana, stepped in briefly.
- Everman did not last. In April 1990 the band recruited Ben Shepherd, an old friend, and the classic line-up was finally complete.
That settled four-piece, Cornell, Thayil, Shepherd and Cameron, is the one that walked into the studio in early 1991 to make the album that would change everything. They arrived with a major-label deal, a growing reputation and, for the first time, a bassist who wrote.
Pre-production and the Shepherd Effect
The arrival of Ben Shepherd is the quiet hinge of the Badmotorfinger story. Where Yamamoto had been a steady, anchoring presence, Shepherd was a restless and prolific writer who pushed the band toward something faster, stranger and more aggressive. For the first time the songwriting was spread widely across all four members, and the credits on the finished album reflect it: Shepherd wrote "Face Pollution" and "Somewhere" outright, co-wrote "Slaves & Bulldozers" and "Jesus Christ Pose", and his fingerprints are all over the record's restless rhythmic personality.
Cornell, for his part, was conscious that the band were being handed a bigger stage and wanted to meet it on their own terms rather than soften for it. Speaking to the press as the album took shape, he framed the record as more memorable without being a sell-out.
"I think there's songs on the new record which are almost more commercially viable because they have that memorable feel to them, and I think if anyone expected us to come out and make something more commercial than Louder Than Love, then I'm glad that they were surprised."
Chris Cornell, Kerrang!, 1991
That surprise was largely a function of how the songs were constructed. Soundgarden had a habit of writing riffs in deeply unusual tunings and time signatures, then refusing to smooth them out. Bottom strings were dropped from E down to B for the extra heaviness and slack. Songs lurched between meters. As Thayil told it, the band rarely even worked out what time signature they were in until after a song was finished, and the lopsided pulse of the album was, in his memorable phrase, "a total accident", the by-product of a deliberate push to get the quirkiness out of things.
Creating the Album
Recording took place in early 1991, spread across three studios: Studio D in Sausalito, Bear Creek Studios up in Woodinville, Washington, and A&M Studios in Hollywood. Behind the desk was Terry Date, the producer who had already worked with Pantera and Overkill and would go on to become one of heavy music's most trusted hands. Date co-produced with the band, engineered the sessions, and helped them capture a sound that was enormous and clear without ever sounding polite.
The defining recording story belongs to "Rusty Cage". Cornell wanted a guitar tone for the main riff that simply could not be dialled in on an amplifier, so the band reached for a wah pedal and used it in a way it was never designed for. Thayil explained the trick years later, and it remains one of the great pieces of grunge studio folklore.
"It's recorded with a wah wah in the low position used as a filter. That was the first time we did anything like that. It was Chris's idea; he wanted to get that weird tone that you can't really dial in on an amp. But if you use the wah wah as a filter, it gets an incredibly weird sound. And if you listen to that riff, especially if you've heard the original demos of it, it almost sounds backward."
Kim Thayil, Guitar School, 1994
The tunings were equally adventurous and equally central to the album's texture. "Rusty Cage", "Searching with My Good Eye Closed" and "Holy Water" all dropped the bottom E string down to a wobbling B. "Mind Riot" went further still, with every string tuned to an octave of E so the whole guitar rang in unison. "Outshined" rolls partly in 7/4 while sounding for all the world like a straight headbanger, and "Face Pollution" is in 9/8. The genius of Badmotorfinger is that almost none of this calls attention to itself. The complexity is structural, buried in the bones of songs that hit like a sledgehammer.
Thayil had a name for the result, only half-joking. He called it the band's "Heavy Metal White Album", a sprawling, varied, slightly indulgent set that refused to settle into one mode. It is the perfect description for a record that runs from the two-minute hardcore blast of "Drawing Flies" to the brooding six-and-a-half-minute crawl of "Slaves & Bulldozers".
Personnel and Credits
For an album so often described as the work of a tight four-piece, Badmotorfinger hides a surprising amount in its credits. There is a saxophone and a trumpet woven into the heavier numbers, a spoken narration buried in one track, and a production and artwork roster that the original CD booklet barely advertised. The horns in particular are the kind of detail that makes the record reward close listening.
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Vocals, rhythm guitar | Chris Cornell | Principal songwriter and lyricist |
| Lead guitar | Kim Thayil | Architect of the drop-B tunings and wah-as-filter tone |
| Bass | Ben Shepherd | His first Soundgarden album; wrote and co-wrote several tracks |
| Drums | Matt Cameron | Also a credited writer on four songs |
| Guest and session musicians | ||
| Saxophone | Scott Granlund | "Room a Thousand Years Wide" and "Drawing Flies" |
| Trumpet | Ernst Long | "Face Pollution", "Room a Thousand Years Wide" and "Drawing Flies" |
| Narration | Damon Stewart | Spoken voice on "Searching with My Good Eye Closed" |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producer, engineer | Terry Date | Co-produced with the band |
| Producer | Soundgarden | Co-production credit |
| Mixing | Ron St. Germain | |
| Mastering | Howie Weinberg | |
| Management | Susan Silver | Long-time Soundgarden manager |
| Artwork | ||
| Front cover illustration | Mark Dancey | Guitarist of Sub Pop band Big Chief; designed the cyclone logo |
| Design | Walberg Design | |
| Photography | Michael Lavine | |
| Art direction | Len Peltier | |
The Songs
Twelve tracks, fifty-seven minutes, and barely a wasted second. Badmotorfinger front-loads its most accessible material, "Rusty Cage" and "Outshined" hit one after the other, then spends the rest of its running time burrowing into stranger, heavier territory. Here is the full running order before a closer look at the songs that matter most.
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rusty Cage | Cornell | 4:26 | Yes (1992) | Wah-as-filter riff; bottom E tuned to B; later covered by Johnny Cash |
| 2 | Outshined | Cornell | 5:10 | Yes (1991) | Partly in 7/4; "looking California, feeling Minnesota" |
| 3 | Slaves & Bulldozers | Shepherd, Cornell | 6:55 | No | Slow-building set-closing monster |
| 4 | Jesus Christ Pose | Cameron, Shepherd, Thayil, Cornell | 5:50 | Yes (lead, 1991) | Video banned by MTV |
| 5 | Face Pollution | Shepherd | 2:23 | No | In 9/8; hardcore-paced |
| 6 | Somewhere | Shepherd | 4:20 | No | Shepherd's lyrics and music |
| 7 | Searching with My Good Eye Closed | Cornell | 6:31 | No | Damon Stewart narration; bottom E to B |
| 8 | Room a Thousand Years Wide | Thayil (lyrics), Cameron (music) | 4:05 | No | Saxophone and trumpet |
| 9 | Mind Riot | Cornell | 4:49 | No | Every string tuned to octaves of E |
| 10 | Drawing Flies | Cameron | 2:26 | No | Horns; short and frantic |
| 11 | Holy Water | Cornell | 5:07 | No | Bottom E to B |
| 12 | New Damage | Thayil, Cameron | 5:40 | No | Sprawling album closer |
"Rusty Cage" is the album's calling card, a runaway-train opener whose lyric of breaking free and the famous backward-sounding riff have outlived almost everything around them. "Outshined" gave the band one of its most quoted lines, Cornell's wry "looking California, feeling Minnesota", and proved that a song in 7/4 could still feel like a fist in the air. Both became radio staples and remain in heavy rotation on rock stations decades later.
"Jesus Christ Pose" is the album's most confrontational moment, a sprinting, jagged attack co-written by all four members. Cornell always insisted the song was not anti-religious but anti-exploitation, a swipe at public figures who strike a crucified pose to cast themselves as martyrs. That nuance would be lost on a good many people once the video appeared. Elsewhere, the deep cuts are where the album's reputation lives: the doom-paced "Slaves & Bulldozers", the eerie "Searching with My Good Eye Closed" with its tolling narration, and the unison-tuned drone of "Mind Riot", a song Cornell wrote about a dream.
B-sides, Outtakes and the SOMMS EP
Soundgarden left a healthy trail of offcuts around Badmotorfinger, and several are essential listening for anyone who loves the record. The most celebrated of the strays is "Birth Ritual", which the band worked on during the album sessions, finished for Cameron Crowe's film Singles in 1992, and later folded onto the compilations Telephantasm and Echo of Miles. "Cold Bitch", a Shepherd favourite, surfaced on the Australasian "Outshined" single. "No Attention" was attempted, judged not to work, and resurrected years later for Down on the Upside.
One outtake carries a strange afterlife. "Black Rain" was mostly recorded during the sessions but never had its vocals completed, so it sat unfinished for almost two decades. The band finally finished it in 2010 and released it on the Telephantasm compilation, where it became their first new single since 1997. A clutch of single B-sides, including covers of the Rolling Stones, Devo and Black Sabbath, came not from the album sessions at all but from a single day's recording with engineer Stuart Hallerman.
Most of those covers were gathered onto a curio that fans treasure: the SOMMS EP, formally titled Satanoscillatemymetallicsonatas, a palindrome that unpacks as "Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas". Released on 28 June 1992 as a bonus disc bundled with a limited edition of Badmotorfinger ahead of the band's Lollapalooza run, it gathered some of the band's best non-album work.
- "Into the Void (Sealth)", a Black Sabbath cover with Chief Seattle's words substituted for the lyric, which earned a 1993 Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance.
- "Girl U Want", a cover of Devo.
- "Stray Cat Blues", a cover of the Rolling Stones.
- "She's a Politician", a short Cornell original.
- A live version of "Slaves & Bulldozers" running to more than eight minutes.
Album Artwork and Packaging
The Badmotorfinger sleeve is one of the most recognisable in the grunge canon, and it was drawn not by a designer but by a fellow musician. Mark Dancey, guitarist of the Sub Pop band Big Chief, created the front cover illustration: a jagged, silver, cyclone-like logo of interlocking blade shapes, at the centre of which sits a red triangle with the album's title running around its interior edge and a small spark plug in the middle. The word Soundgarden runs in blunt red capitals across the top, all of it set against deep black. Some early 1991 pressings swapped the scheme for a yellow-green palette.
It is an oddly mechanical, almost industrial image for a record obsessed with conflict and entropy, and it suits the title perfectly. The packaging was completed by photography from Michael Lavine, a Seattle scene mainstay, with design by Walberg Design and art direction by Len Peltier. The spark-plug-and-cyclone logo has since become shorthand for the album itself, reproduced on a quarter-century of T-shirts and reissues.
Release and Reception
Critically, Badmotorfinger was a clear step up, and reviewers said so at the time and have said it louder since. AllMusic's Steve Huey awarded it four and a half stars and put his finger on exactly what set it apart from the metal pack.
"The songwriting takes a quantum leap in focus and consistency. It's surprisingly cerebral and arty music for a band courting mainstream metal audiences, but it attacks with scientific precision."
Steve Huey, AllMusic
He was not alone. Pitchfork later scored it 8.3, NME gave it eight out of ten, and the album drew strong notices from Spin, Mojo, Blender and the Los Angeles Times. Writing in Entertainment Weekly, Gina Arnold praised the band for writing more engagingly than contemporaries "who seldom get beyond extolling booze, girls, and cars", and judged the record "stylishly bombastic rather than bludgeoningly bombastic". In NME, Keith Cameron heard the band striking "a cool balance" between Cornell's "bluesy screams" and Thayil's "brutish riff powerplay", calling it more "stripped down, lithe and lethal" than its predecessor.
Commercially, the record was the band's biggest yet. It reached number 39 on the Billboard 200, peaking in late February 1992, which made it Soundgarden's highest-charting album to that point. It matched that with number 39 in the UK and charted across Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Slow and steady rather than explosive, it was certified platinum in January 1993 and double platinum by the RIAA later in the decade, eventually selling more than two million copies in the US and finishing among the hundred best-selling albums of 1992.
Singles and Music Videos
Three singles were drawn from the album across 1991 and 1992, each with its own video, and one of them became the most talked-about thing the band had ever done. The table below lays out the run.
| Single | Released | Notable chart peaks |
|---|---|---|
| Jesus Christ Pose | September 1991 (lead) | UK No. 30 |
| Outshined | November 1991 | US Mainstream Rock No. 45, UK No. 50, Australia No. 76 |
| Rusty Cage | March 1992 | UK No. 41, Australia No. 80 (Alternative No. 4) |
"Jesus Christ Pose" arrived first and immediately ran into trouble. The video, directed by Eric Zimmerman, was banned by MTV amid a controversy over its perceived anti-Christian imagery, and the band received death threats while touring the UK. It is a striking, strobing piece of film, and its suppression did more to build the band's outsider reputation than any amount of airplay could have.
"Outshined" followed and became the album's enduring rock-radio anthem, its central line entering the grunge lexicon. "Rusty Cage" closed the campaign in March 1992 with another Zimmerman video, this one showing the band performing in a stark white room intercut with scenes of the members being chased through a forest by dogs, farmers and a man in a truck. Its B-side was a previously unreleased cover called "Touch Me". All three videos earned heavy alternative-radio and MTV play, the banned one excepted, and helped push the album toward platinum.
Touring and Live
Soundgarden toured Badmotorfinger relentlessly and, in doing so, served a hard apprenticeship in front of audiences who had not come to see them. After an opening North American run in October and November 1991, they were handed two of the biggest support slots in rock: opening for Guns N' Roses on the gargantuan Use Your Illusion tour, and then opening for Skid Row on the North American leg of the Slave to the Grind tour in early 1992. Cornell was honest about how punishing the arena slots could be.
"It wasn't a whole lot of fun going out in front of 40,000 people for 35 minutes every day. Most of them hadn't heard our songs and didn't care about them. It was a bizarre thing."
Chris Cornell, Raw, 1993
Between those slots the band ran a month-long headlining theatre tour of Europe, where they could play to their own crowd at their own length, then returned to the US before rejoining Guns N' Roses for European dates in the summer of 1992 alongside Faith No More. The campaign's crowning moment came that summer when Soundgarden joined the touring 1992 Lollapalooza, sharing a bill with Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Ministry and Ice Cube, a line-up that captured the cross-genre churn of the moment perfectly. A Seattle homecoming show at the Paramount Theatre was filmed and released as the concert video Motorvision.
In TV, Film and Media
The album's songs have led a long second life on screen and in games, with "Rusty Cage" proving especially durable. The band themselves appeared in Cameron Crowe's 1992 film Singles, the affectionate snapshot of the Seattle scene, and contributed the outtake "Birth Ritual" to its soundtrack. "Outshined" turned up on the soundtrack to Tony Scott's True Romance in 1993.
- "Rusty Cage" featured on the soundtrack of the 1994 racing game Road Rash, which won 3DO's "Soundtrack of the Year" award.
- It returned on the fictional station Radio X in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004, and again, in full, in Burnout Paradise in 2008.
- It was issued as Rock Band 3 downloadable content in 2011.
- Johnny Cash's later cover even appeared in Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and Toyota used "Rusty Cage" in a 2014 Corolla advert.
Controversy and Censorship
The "Jesus Christ Pose" affair was the only real storm the album generated, but it was a significant one. MTV's decision to ban the video, and the wave of death threats the band received while touring Britain, turned a five-minute album track into a minor culture-war flashpoint. Cornell was repeatedly forced to explain that the lyric was an attack on the cynical use of religious martyrdom as a public-relations pose, not on faith itself, a distinction that did little to calm the people sending the threats.
In hindsight the episode reads as an early example of a music video being judged on a glance rather than a listen, and it hardened Soundgarden's sense of themselves as a band that would not be told what to do. Beyond that single flashpoint, Badmotorfinger attracted little of the parental-advisory furore that swirled around many of its heavier contemporaries.
Covers, Samples and Tributes
The single most remarkable thing to happen to a Badmotorfinger song happened five years after release and in an entirely different genre. In 1996, Johnny Cash recorded "Rusty Cage" for his album Unchained, produced by Rick Rubin for American Recordings. Cash and Rubin stripped Cornell's drop-B grunge anthem down to a swinging, ominous country-rock stomp, and the transformation was so complete that many listeners had no idea it was a Soundgarden song at all.
Unchained won the Grammy for Best Country Album, and Cash's version of "Rusty Cage" earned him a nomination for Best Male Country Vocal Performance. Soundgarden returned the compliment on a handful of dates in 1996, playing the song live in Cash's country-rock arrangement rather than their own. It remains one of the great cross-genre covers in modern rock, a grunge riff reborn as Americana.
The album's wider influence is harder to measure but easy to hear. Kirk Hammett of Metallica has cited Soundgarden as an influence on the riff to "Enter Sandman", and a generation of heavier, more cerebral bands, from Biffy Clyro to the Dillinger Escape Plan, have pointed back to Badmotorfinger as a template for marrying brains and brawn.
Reissues, Remasters and Anniversaries
For its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2016, Badmotorfinger received the full deluxe treatment, and the project came with a sobering backstory. The remaster could not be made from the original master tapes, because those half-inch reels had been destroyed in the catastrophic 2008 Universal Studios backlot fire, a disaster that wiped out master recordings by hundreds of artists. The band only learned in May 2015 that their masters were gone. The anniversary edition was therefore built from a backup DAT safety copy, a quiet reminder of how fragile even a platinum album's physical history can be.
What the reissue lacked in original tape it made up for in scope. The expanded versions were generous to a fault.
- A two-disc Deluxe Edition pairing the remastered album with outtakes and a 1992 live recording from Seattle's Paramount Theatre.
- A seven-disc Super Deluxe box adding the full Paramount audio, a DVD of the concert, the Motorvision film and a 5.1 surround mix on Blu-ray Audio.
- A limited two-LP silver vinyl pressing, capped at a thousand copies.
- A bonus 7-inch reissue of "Jesus Christ Pose" for the first thousand pre-orders.
Legacy and Influence
Badmotorfinger sits at a fascinating point in Soundgarden's arc: heavier and knottier than the blockbuster that followed, more assured than anything that came before. It was the bridge record, the album where the band's experimental instincts and their commercial reach met exactly in the middle. Everything that made Superunknown a number-one, six-times-platinum, Grammy-winning phenomenon in 1994 was already present here in rawer form.
The wider story, of course, turned darker. After Superunknown came Down on the Upside in 1996 and then a bitter break-up in 1997, with Cornell going on to front Audioslave alongside three former members of Rage Against the Machine. The band reunited in 2010 and released King Animal in 2012, but Chris Cornell's death in May 2017 brought the story to a heartbreaking close. In November 2025, Soundgarden were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with founding bassist Hiro Yamamoto rejoining the surviving members and Cornell's daughter Toni singing in his place.
Through all of it, Badmotorfinger has only grown in stature. Rolling Stone ranked it the second-greatest grunge album of all time in 2019, behind only Nevermind, and it has appeared on definitive-album lists from Kerrang!, Revolver, Guitar World and beyond. As one of the four pillars of grunge, alongside Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, Soundgarden made the genre's most musically ambitious major statement here. It is the thinking listener's grunge record, and time has been very kind to it.
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The backward riff | The main "Rusty Cage" riff was recorded with a wah pedal locked in its lowest position and used as a filter, a trick that makes the riff "almost sound backward" in Kim Thayil's words. |
| Heavy Metal White Album | Thayil jokingly nicknamed the sprawling, stylistically restless record the band's "Heavy Metal White Album". |
| The title is a joke | Thayil coined "Badmotorfinger" off the top of his head as a play on the title of Montrose's song "Bad Motor Scooter". |
| It was almost two weeks early | A&M had scheduled the album for 24 September 1991 but pushed it back to 8 October because of production problems, dropping it straight into the post-Nevermind rush. |
| Hidden horns | Saxophonist Scott Granlund and trumpeter Ernst Long play on several of the album's heaviest tracks, including "Drawing Flies" and "Room a Thousand Years Wide". |
| Shepherd's debut | It was Ben Shepherd's first album with the band; he replaced Jason Everman, who had himself briefly replaced founding bassist Hiro Yamamoto. |
| The palindrome EP | The companion EP was titled Satanoscillatemymetallicsonatas, a palindrome that reads as "Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas". |
| Cash and Rubin | Johnny Cash recorded "Rusty Cage" for his Rick Rubin-produced 1996 album Unchained, which won the Grammy for Best Country Album. |
| The masters burned | The original half-inch master tapes were destroyed in the 2008 Universal Studios fire, so the 2016 remaster was built from a backup DAT safety copy. |
| Odd meters by accident | Soundgarden often did not work out a song's time signature until after writing it; Thayil called the album's lopsided meters "a total accident". |
| An unfinished ghost | The outtake "Black Rain" sat without vocals for almost twenty years before being completed and released in 2010 as the band's first new single since 1997. |
The Riffology Podcast
If this deep dive has you reaching for the drop-B tunings and the spark-plug logo all over again, the conversation carries on over on the Riffology podcast, where we dig into the albums that shaped heavy music one record at a time. You will find Riffology on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and every major platform, so subscribe, settle in, and let us take you back to the autumn grunge went supernova.
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