Hear Ann Wilson’s Audioslave Cover in Memory of Chris Cornell
Heart singer Ann Wilson has unveiled her cover of the Audioslave song “I Am the Highway,” which is taken from her upcoming solo album Immortal that's made up of tribute cover versions of late artists who inspired her.
You can listen to “I Am the Highway,” her tribute to close friend Chris Cornell, below.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Wilson recalled seeing Chester Bennington’s reaction to Cornell’s suicide last year, just weeks before Bennington took his own life. She said she was in a TV dressing room when someone told her that Bennington, whose band Linkin Park were also scheduled to play the show, wanted to speak to her.
“He was really upset,” she remembered. “This was just a couple of weeks before he decided to take himself … He was really a mess. So anxious and sad and had to go onstage in a minute. I think that Chris’s departure hit him hard because he recognized the impulse. He had been hit by this news. There was a lot of fear there. I said to him, let’s just breathe here and look in each other’s eyes and go, ‘We’re still here right now, let’s just do this.’ A couple of weeks later, he was gone.”
Wilson also thought the late artists "seemed to resemble each other." "I think they knew each other and they had probably commiserated," she noted. "I wouldn’t say one made the other happen, but Chris’s death obviously affected Chester deeply. Chris’s death affected me, but I wasn’t that surprised. He always had gallows humor about being lonely in hotel rooms. ‘The only thing missing is a noose,’ he’d say. And it was like, ‘Oh, Chris.’ And he’s like ‘[I’m] too tired, the road is too hard, too impersonal.’ He was darkly joking.”
Immortal will be released on Sept. 14. Wilson begins a tour of North America alongside Jeff Beck and Paul Rodgers on July 18.