The music spoke to my being in the world more than the promise of any college degree. I didn’t just listen to music, I devoured stories about the musicians, their often hedonistic lifestyles their processes and epiphanies. I grew up listening to The Beatles and Prince Led Zeppelin and Miles Davis David Bowie and Willie Nelson, along with a litany of other artists and musicians crafting the kind of meaningful music I responded to. When grunge first exploded on the pop culture scene, I was a college student flailing around in pursuit of an English degree I had less passion for than I did for music. Wood’s untimely death at the age of 24, only days before his band’s debut album release, shook the close-knit Seattle music scene and remained a source of angst and inspiration for a genre of music that shaped youth culture of the 1990s. I thought about when Cornell and Staley said goodbye to their friend Andy Wood, lead singer of Mother Love Bone, after he overdosed on heroine in 1990. Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley died in 2002 at the age of 35, and Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 had resonated around the globe. I remember thinking, there’s only one left, referring to Eddie Vedder, lead singer for Pearl Jam, and lone survivor of the four seminal grunge bands that rose to fame in the early 1990s whose lead singers passed away much too soon. As the lead singer of Soundgarden and a pioneer of early 1990s grunge music, his voice revealed an unbridled pain and joy backed up by the raw, guitar-driven rock emanating from the Seattle, Washington music scene. The death of Chris Cornell in the spring of 2017 shook me.

Fashion grunge overlay