Billboard.com has issued a story from Gary Graff in which he interviews SOUNDGARDEN frontman Chris Cornell about his Songbook Tour and Soundgarden's forthcoming new album. The following is an excerpt:

The tour comes after a productive few weeks with Soundgarden, who reconvened earlier this month to work on the group's first album since 1996's Down on the Upside at Cornell's studio in Seattle.

"We're pretty far into our record now," Cornell reports. "I don't really know how to describe it musically, because typically with Soundgarden... every time we write a song we always take it for what it is and try to make it the most it can be. It's very diverse, I can tell you that."

Read the full report at Billboard.com.

Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron recently told Billboard.com that, "there's a little bit of evolution going on with some of this new music, but we're not straying too far from the formula. It has all our signature elements - and more. I think people are going to really love it."

The band's recent writing sessions generated 12-14 songs that Cameron says "are kind of ready to go," but he also expects that "once we get into a studio environment, we'll come up with new ideas and rearrange what we have." The existing songs, he says, are "about 90 percent new," but some draw on ideas that date as far back as 1996's Down On The Upside, as well as some riffs he wrote around 2008. "We've tried to update the super-old stuff," he says. "It doesn't sound too old and dusty and crusty to my ears - but maybe to someone else it will. I think guitar-based music is not really as popular as it has been in the past, so it might sound kind of out of date or out of tune with what's going on right now. Or it might be a breath of fresh air to have an unabashedly loud guitar band out there."

Read the entire interview at Billboard.com.