Cathy A. Campagna from The Aquarian Weekly spoke with SOUNDGARDEN frontman Chris Cornell recently about a number of topics including the band's anxiously-anticipated reunion album. An excerpts from the chat follow:

The Aquarian Weekly: Soundgarden is writing new songs now. What have you noticed to be different about that whole process now with the passing of time? Have the perimeters of the band widened even more?

Cornell: "The one thing that I have noticed that is different is that we are a lot more relaxed. I think we were always relaxed, but more so than ever. And the main reason for that is that we don’t have a release date. We don’t have a calendar with an x on it that says you have to be done by this day. We don’t have that, we are just recording, and it will be done when we decided it’s done. That was the act that was always chasing after us, was that we were this indie band that did whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, then we became part of this bigger business.

Then that sort of began the cyclical album, tour thing and there were always dates proposed and tours happening. When you go in to start writing for example, and someone is slating that it will be released at a specific time—that just doesn’t make any sense. With Soundgarden especially, it didn’t work well with us, and that was a big part of why we stopped being Soundgarden. Now that is gone. I always speculate a lot that that was the biggest factor, and now that I see that it’s not there, I see that is the biggest factor.

We have been working in the same way we always did in terms of effort, showing up and being excited creatively. We have done a lot in a pretty short period of time without the constraints of a schedule, without somebody plotting out tours for us, and that we would have to go whether we feel like we are finished with the record or not."

Read the entire interview here.

Soundgarden reconvened in early March to work on the group's first album since 1996's Down On The Upside at Cornell's studio in Seattle.