During the 12-year period of inactivity for Soundgarden following their disbanding in April 1997, and eventual reunion in January 2010, the band's guitarist Kim Thayil did not release a solo album.

In a new interview with WFPK's Kyle Meredith, which can be heard below, Thayil revealed what stopped his solo record from ever happening.

Kim Thayil: "Probably a lot of reasons. I think at the time, I was really fed up with a creative pursuit — you know, songwriting — turning into constant meetings with accountants and lawyers and managers and record company people; I just wasn't interested. When the band broke up, I was initially interested in going back and playing recreationally, which is what I was able to do — play recreationally. And I was really hesitant towards the idea of cobbing together a professional infrastructure. There were some holdbacks to it."

"When Soundgarden broke up in the late '90s, all the people we knew at A&M, eventually, a year or two later, A&M was bought," he continued. "Everyone we knew there was fired. And then the label was kind of subsumed into Universal. So we had no label; none of the people we worked with at the label were still there. Our manager, Susan Silver, who was our long-term manager and integral to the growth and success of Soundgarden and Chris (Cornell)'s solo career, she took time off and became a mother. So her management company ended up being a post office box and a voicemail. So there was no band, there was no record label, there was no management. And I thought, 'Fine with me.' I was kind of getting tired of accountants and lawyers and managers. I didn't wanna go and dig up management, I didn't wanna go call up the lawyers, I didn't wanna have to go and look for a label. So I just hung out with my friends and we played guitar and we recorded songs and riffs with the hopes that maybe someday it would be something. But I enjoyed playing recreationally and was resisting the professional thing, because there was just too much that had become discouraging about it. That's probably the main reason."

"Another reason is because so much of Soundgarden's sound is born of my aesthetic that anything I had done… We're a guitar band. I'm the guitarist. I wrote all the guitar parts and all the riffs in the original incarnations of the band," he explained. "Almost all the music was written by me, from '84 on, until… Hiro (Yamamoto, original bassist) wrote a lot too. And then Chris started writing more as he got more comfortable with playing guitar. And Matt (Cameron, drummer) came in, and Matt — same thing. He was learning guitar and writing songs and introducing stuff and bringing the drummer sensibility to things. But anything I would have done would have sounded like Soundgarden without the greatest singer in the world and the greatest drummer in the world. So, that was a little bit discouraging too. It's, like, why would I wanna do a B-grade Soundgarden?"