Soundgarden's Superunknown album is regarded as one of the greatest rock albums of the '90s, but as producer Michael Beinhorn reveals in a new interview, the Seattle band's fourth record had a difficult birth.
In conversation with music industry expert/YouTube personality Rick Beato, Beinhorn, who had previously recorded hit albums for Red Hot Chili Peppers and Soul Asylum before signing up to work with Chris Cornell's band on the follow-up to Badmotorfinger, admits that when he was presented with the band's initial demos for Superunknown, he had tactfully tell them that they were not yet ready to make a record: "There were 11 pieces [of music] on it, and out of the 11, I think five were usable."
When Chris Cornell sent the producer another batch of demos, Beinhorn was even more dismayed, he admits.
"They were sounding like second-rate Soundgarden songs," he recalls. "Obviously his worst stuff is still better than a lot of stuff that people are doing nowadays right, but still it wasn't up to par of what we what I felt we needed on this record. So I I called him up and I spoke to him about it. I was like. What are you writing these songs for? And immediately I got to the to the bottom of it: he felt that he needed to make something familiar for Soundgarden fans."
