Heart's Ann Wilson Streams Chris Cornell Tribute Song

(hennemusic) Heart vocalist Ann Wilson is paying tribute to the late Chris Cornell with a stream of her take on Audioslave's "I Am The Highway", from her forthcoming covers album, "Immortal."

Beyond musical compatriots from the Seattle music scene, the pair were friends, and Wilson recalls the unique situation she found herself in on May 18, 2017 - the day Cornell took his own life in a Detroit hotel room.

Wilson tells Rolling Stone that she was minutes away from performing Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" as a tribute to Cornell on ABC-TV's Jimmy Kimmel Live when Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington, whose band was also set to appear, reached out to her backstage.

"Someone came into my dressing room and said 'Chester would like to talk to you' - he was really upset," Wilson remembers. "This was just a couple of weeks before [Chester] decided to take himself. So I went in. He was really a mess. So anxious and sad and had to go onstage in a minute. I think that Chris's departure hit [Chester] hard because he recognized the impulse. He had been hit by this news. There was a lot of fear there. I said to him, let's just breathe here and look in each other's eyes and go 'we're still here right now, let's just do this.' A couple of weeks later, he was gone.

"They seemed to resemble each other," adds the Heart rocker. "I think they knew each other and they had probably commiserated. I wouldn't say one made the other happen, but Chris's death obviously affected Chester deeply.

"Chris's death affected me, but I wasn't that surprised. He always had gallows humor about being lonely in hotel rooms. 'The only thing missing is a noose,' he'd say. And it was like 'oh, Chris.' And he's like '[I'm] too tired, the road is too hard, too impersonal.' He was darkly joking." Stream the song and read more here.

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