In May of 2017, the world lost one of its greatest voices and songwriters: Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell. Just days later, Norah Jones stepped onto the stage of Detroit’s Fox Theatre, where Soundgarden performed their final show. That evening, she transformed the band’s hit “Black Hole Sun” on her piano from a grunge anthem into a reverent elegy.
What Jones accomplished was more than a well-done cover. It was a meditation on loss, filtered through her grace and artistry.
Cornell wrote “Black Hole Sun” in 1994 after a spark of inspiration from misunderstanding something a news anchor said on TV.
“I thought that would make an amazing song title, but what would it sound like?” he said in an interview with Uncut Magazine. “It all came together, pretty much the whole arrangement including the guitar solo that’s played beneath the riff. I spent a lot of time spinning those melodies in my head so I wouldn’t forget them. I got home and whistled it into a Dictaphone. The next day I brought it into the real world, assigning a couple of key changes in the verse to make the melodies more interesting. Then I wrote the lyrics and that was similar, a stream of consciousness based on the feeling I got from the chorus and title.”
As for the lyrics, Cornell’s stream of consciousness produced a “surreal dreamscape” to match the song title, with the singer explaining the song as a kind of paradox. “No one seems to get this, but ‘Black Hole Sun’ is sad,” he said. “But because the melody is really pretty, everyone thinks it’s almost chipper, which is ridiculous.”
That paradox took on a new meaning with Jones’s transformative performance. She traded out the original’s distorted guitars and bravado for stillness and reflection. Sitting at the piano, she reshaped it into an intimate, melancholy reflection.
“It was very emotional. It was one of the most intense experiences I’ve ever had live. People were so emotional about his death,” Jones told Don Was in an interview. “It was so heavy learning it on the piano. I didn’t realize how heavy that song was. I grew up with it, but I had never played it. It’s a very, very deep song, musically and harmonically.”
Jones slowed the tempo and employed her solo jazz vocabulary to create a beautiful extended intro before beginning the lyrics. Her gorgeous, breathy tone and simple phrasing get straight to the heart of the song. She also expanded on the harmony of the song slightly by creating dominant chords in the verses to add harmonic motion.
Near the end of her arrangement, Jones repeats the chorus like a mantra that seeps into your soul before giving you time to reflect.
As Beautiful Song of the Week explains, “Whereas the original builds after the final chorus and does the standard drive-it-into-the-wall 90s rock ending, Jones pushes the chords up an octave and fades out slowly, for an equal but opposite emotional effect.”
Check out her emotionally-charged performance in the video above and follow along with the sheet music for “Black Hole Sun”:
