“What came out of a tragedy gave birth to something that was hugely positive in my life.” How the legendary Chris Cornell channelled his grief over a dear friend's death into making one of the 90s' most underrated classics

Chris Cornell live in 1991.

Eight months passed between the tragic death of Mother Love Bone frontman Andrew Wood and Chris Cornell, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament and Mike McCready entering the studio to record their tribute album to the Mother Love Bone frontman.

A lot went on in that time, a stark lesson for these young musicians that even though their world had ended with the death of their friend (and for fellow Mother Love Bone members Gossard and Ament, their bandmate), it certainly kept spinning. It’s for a reason that Cornell, who himself died in 2017, described Wood’s passing as “the death of innocence” for the burgeoning grunge scene. “The impossible suddenly was happening irrevocably in front of us,” Cornell recalled in the official Pearl Jam biography Pearl Jam Twenty, “and we were all sitting there having really no tools to deal with it.”