Kim Thayil’s “A Screaming Life” will make you hear Soundgarden differently

2026 has been a year of great music books, and another contender for that list has arrived. Soundgarden founding member and guitarist Kim Thayil gives us “A Screaming Life: Into the Superunknown with Soundgarden and Beyond,” out on June 9. “A Screaming Life” isn’t a massive tome, but it still manages to dive deep when it matters, and also when you least expect it to.

Memoir is challenging for many reasons, with the decision of how much intricate detail of one’s life and work to include at the top of that list. It’s a difficult line to walk if you want to be a decent human being — obviously, people writing tell-all memoirs understand that they’ve decided to open all the doors and air all the dirty laundry, no matter how it impacts people on the periphery. People want dirt, and it’s easy to give it to them.

Thayil does not do any of this in “A Screaming Life,” but he also does not avoid difficult subjects, including the disintegration and breakup of the band in 1997, as well as the death by suicide of his friend, Soundgarden lead singer Chris Cornell, in Detroit in 2017. The book follows a loose but kinetic structure that keeps moving forward, and as the reader progresses through the story, you might find yourself gingerly turning the page to the next chapter, dreading the inevitable moment when the band learns of Cornell’s passing. Thayil tells the story by bringing the reader along with him as he first hears the rumors and then has the news confirmed. It isn’t histrionic; it is honest, and it is awful — but those are the accurate emotions.

Thayil told Salon, “I wasn’t initially comfortable with being more intimate or in any way that would be confessional as I understand memoirs to be somewhat, right? And I didn’t feel like I owed that to anyone. At some point, I thought, well, maybe I owe it to myself. Maybe it’s interesting to get some perspective on the achievements and the gains and the loss. I thought maybe I owe that to our friends.”

Of course, those friends include other famous Seattle musicians, both the ones still present and the ones who left the planet. Thayil brings the reader with him as he experiences learning about Kurt Cobain’s death while on the road in Europe with Tad, another band from the Seattle scene. And, of course, there was also the passing of Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood, who had been Chris Cornell’s roommate and dear friend. You can’t tell this story without revisiting all of those events, and Thayil does so with respect and care.

It’s also unusual to get to hear these stories from the perspective of a Seattleite who was an essential part of that music scene. This isn’t a journalist writing about someone whose music they listened to and maybe spoke to once. These people were someone’s bandmate, roommate, and friend, and Thayil’s ability to convey those feelings and that grief had to be difficult to retell and get on the page. It feels exceedingly generous. It is also heartbreaking as Thayil looks back at Cornell’s life and work and berates himself for not seeing what he feels were clues to Cornell’s mindset: “I feel like I let Chris down by not seeing the look in his eyes, or not hearing a tone in his voice—not being able to read it.”

There was no great drama around the breakup of Soundgarden; there was a press release with a measured, careful statement, and then the band was no more. If you weren’t a big fan at the time, you may have barely noticed. But if you were following the band, you’ll remember how it seemed to arrive out of nowhere, at the end of two years of touring, including the 1996 Lollapalooza outing. Sometimes bands break up for one specific or large reason, and sometimes it is a chain of events, seemingly unrelated, or not visible from the outside. In the case of Soundgarden, it was the latter, and by the time the reader reaches that part of the book, it’s not difficult to understand why it happened.

“A Screaming Life” is roughly chronological — it borrows the current music memoir trend of small, short chapters which are sequenced using some kind of connective device — and unlike some other books that use this strategy, Thayil’s memoir does a great job of not just moving the reader forward, but making sure that the reader has the information they require to understand the current moment. You don’t arrive at a chapter and then find yourself needing to frantically page backwards to try to find the previous reference to a person or event, because it will already be present.

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A good example of that is how Thayil tells the story of what became the grunge “supergroup” project Temple of the Dog, which included Chris Cornell and drummer Matt Cameron, as well as Pearl Jam guitarists Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, PJ bassist Jeff Ament, and some vocals from a new guy named Eddie Vedder. Thayil talks about how Chris Cornell was writing songs after Andy Wood’s death by overdose in one chapter, tying it to an explanation of how Wood’s death inspired Cornell to follow his creative example: “There was a switch that flipped after Andy died, and Chris became more courageous in his risk-taking. His natural ability to write cool songs around his melodic ideas was now fortified with the courage to take creative risks and to approach his guitar playing and songwriting in new ways,” is how Thayil explained it. But then Pearl Jam exploded, Soundgarden had also taken a step up on the ladder, “grunge” was a thing, and A&M Records was going to make the most of something they already had in their catalog. None of this happened exactly in sequence, but the book ties it together cleanly and accurately.

(Courtesy of HarperCollins) Soundgarden

Credit for the continual attention to threading the story consistently should also go to Thayil’s co-author, Adem Tepedelen, for juggling a multitude of facts and information and introducing them in a sequence that’s easy to understand and comprehend, whether the reader is someone who saw Soundgarden at the Central back in the day, or discovered them from their older sister’s records when the band returned for their second round in 2011. Kim Thayil is a highly intelligent and cerebral individual — there was a running joke on the old Soundgarden fan mailing list about Thayil’s use of “ferrivorous” in 1996’s “Never The Machine Forever” — and his humor, intelligence and dry wit are present on every page. It feels like he’s sitting there and talking to you.

What was in the water in Park Forest, Illinois? This locale has produced Kim Thayil and Soundgarden co-founder, bassist Hiro Yamamoto, as well as Sub Pop co-founder Bruce Pavitt and legendary Geffen A&R rep Tom Zutaut (who signed Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, Def Leppard, and many others). This is a memoir, and Thayil spends a reasonable amount of pages opening up about his family of origin, his childhood and the place he grew up. He attributes much of his personal and professional success to the people he grew up with.

In 1986, Bruce Pavitt was just a music-loving guy putting out a cassette zine and writing a column in Seattle’s bi-weekly music paper, “The Rocket.” He loved Soundgarden and was the one who invented their “total fu*king godhead” tagline when he used it to describe the band’s live show. In the book, Thayil admits that the band had built a strong live reputation, enhanced by Chris Cornell’s habit of appearing onstage shirtless. But instead of quietly (or even loudly!) explaining why their live shows were so great, Thayil has another theory: “I can’t help but think that at least a little of our popularity was fueled by a lot of people in our scene doing MDMA.” (Many things can be true at once, Kim!)

Kim Thayil holds grudges. Not in a bad way, but in a very normal human way, and he shares them throughout the book. Frankly, it’s kind of delightful to be in on them, even when they’re anonymous (although you could probably figure out which unnamed Australian New Wave band locked Soundgarden out of their shared dressing room at the 9:30 Club during the band’s SST days). Thayil wants to get things right — he explains that he was the person thinking about Soundgarden’s legacy after the band broke up in 1997. Once the record company stopped caring, the band had no online presence, and you couldn’t even buy a Soundgarden T-shirt if you wanted to — and these minor but not unimportant reassertions of the truth are tied into that mindset.

(Jim Dyson/WireImage/Getty Images) Kim Thayil and Chris Cornell

If you think this is an exaggeration, Thayil begins correcting the record on page four, where he explains why some people believe a band called the Shemps was an early version of Soundgarden, because there’s a photo on the internet of the Shemps that features both Chris Cornell and Hiro Yamamoto. The only problem with that is that while Cornell, Thayil and Yamamoto all individually took turns playing in the Shemps to make money, that version of the band never performed in public. This is one example of many.

Discovering in the course of this book that Kim Thayil has synesthesia — a condition where one sense triggers another — was a huge aha moment. Suddenly, so many Soundgarden songs and visuals made sense, like “Room A Thousand Years Wide” (for which Thayil was the lyricist). Thayil’s synesthesia manifests as him having color and shape associations with words and letters (among other elements), meaning that letters, sentences or phrases have their own color palette. He explains in the book that “. . . I could often advocate on behalf of arrangements or songs or decision making within songs based on the colors and shapes a certain passage evoked.”

When speaking to Salon, Thayil generously explained what colors he saw in Soundgarden’s “Jesus Christ Pose”: “The word ‘Jesus’ is orangish, with brownish and reddish tones. ‘Christ’ is similar, but a little bit more yellow. And ‘Pose’ is very blue with some purples in there. So it’s the words, it’s letters and numbers.” He explains that he didn’t even know what this condition was, or that it was a condition, until the ’90s, but in the book he explains that it was like this for him since he was a child.

Unless you were living in Seattle in the late ’90’s, the WTO conference held there in November of 1999 and the accompanying protests — known to some as “the Battle of Seattle” — may have just skirted your consciousness. That week, downtown Seattle was cordoned off because protestors had taken over the streets surrounding the convention center, and some activists had broken the windows of a Starbucks nearby.

There was one big problem with this: Kim Thayil was going to be playing guitar in front of an audience for the first time since the breakup of Soundgarden, as part of the NO WTO Combo, featuring Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra as well as Krist Novoselic, a musician that played in “a big old band whose name I can’t remember at the moment,” as Biafra introduced him on the night, and there was no way local Soundgarden fans (including your columnist) was going to miss this.

This was achieved by taking a roundabout way into downtown, listening to the college radio station (then KCMU, which later became KEXP), which kept informing listeners that if you had a ticket to the show you were “allowed” to be in that area and that you should just go despite the drastically increased police presence; in the book, Thayil explains that he and the other musicians also ran into multiple police barricades on their way to the show.

This is the type of milestone that would probably only be important to local Soundgarden fans in Seattle, but not necessarily matter to a wider public, much less make an appearance in this book. “I think the fact that we made an album out of that, the fact that the event was documented required some inclusion, certainly, in the story,” Thayil tells Salon. “Plus, Jello Biafra was a bit of a hero of mine in the late ’70s. When the single came out, “California Über Alles,” I thought, oh my God, I love the way he sang. I love the fact that it was political and it was hardcore. And yeah, the Dead Kennedys were a big deal in my late teens. And so, the opportunity to work with this guy who held Alternative Tentacles Records and so many — my record collection, so much of it is due to him. And so, I thought it was important that I do include that.”

According to Kim Thayil, Soundgarden (and later, Pearl Jam) drummer Matt Cameron is a literal saint, halo and everything. That is not just his opinion; that is backed up by comments and anecdotes from people like producer Jack Endino (“Jack loved Matt’s drum sound and thought it was a gift to him as an engineer.”). But Thayil’s description of why Cameron decided to join Soundgarden (and not accept the many other offers he potentially had, at least in Thayil’s mind) ends up being a great description of what made Soundgarden different and special, in an environment where there were many different and special bands just hanging around: “. . . he liked the challenge we posed as songwriters and as personalities . . . He genuinely liked the material, and he liked the way we were ascending, building our audience and growing creatively and commercially. And I think he trusted the kind of people we were . . . We may have been cranky, but we were also decent people . . . He just saw us as principled.” No one has defined Soundgarden better than that.

Thayil told Salon, “You know, sometimes you remember some of the dickish things your friends or your bandmates do, but the overall picture is like, wow, they’re just kind of sensitive and generous. And that’s the case with all my bandmates, and everyone’s done things like that. I think there’s a triumph.”

“A Screaming Life” will have you wanting to go back through your records and dig out music you hadn’t heard in years, and in other cases, go looking for releases you may not have been aware of (such as the NO WTO Band, as well as “Live On I-5,” a compilation of concert recordings from the band’s heyday). Thayil’s memoir will absolutely encourage readers to listen again, or listen deeper, or even listen for the first time, and that’s really the highest praise you can give a rock and roll memoir. It’s the entire point.