If you feel like we’ve been losing music legends at an alarming rate, well, you’re not alone. Just off the top of my head, David Bowie, Lemmy Kilmister, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Sharon Jones, Glenn Frey, Merle Haggard, Maurice White, Leon Russell and George Michael have all died within roughly the last year, prompting headlines declaring 2016 as a second “year the music died.”

Add Chris Cornell to that list. The Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog, Audioslave and solo singer-songwriter was found dead in a Detroit hotel room May 18 in what has since been determined to be a suicide by hanging.

While many of these losses have been painful for me as a fan and music lover in general (Bowie, Prince, Cohen and Kilmister in particular), Cornell’s death has hit even harder. Cornell and Soundgarden were formative influences on me as a musician and as a listener. Soundgarden was one of the first bands to hit my consciousness in middle/high school, after early obsessions with Metallica and then Nirvana. I still have my very beat-up, scratched-beyond-recognition-yet-still-playable CD copy of “Superunknown” that was passed on to me by my mom’s boyfriend’s (at the time) daughter. The first time I heard “Fell on Black Days” — my first introduction to Cornell’s dark, depressing imagery and swirling, rhythmic guitar shapes — I immediately related. Clearly, I was not a happy kid. I’ll admit I was never a fan of Audioslave, and didn’t pay Cornell’s solo albums much mind (a grievous error, I know — I saw him on his solo acoustic tour in 2011 and am still in awe).

Obviously songs such as “Fell on Black Days” — or “Black Hole Sun” or “Burden in my Hand” or “Outshined” or dozens of others — will be scrutinized anew in light of Cornell’s suicide. And there will be plenty of calls for society as a whole to better understand suicide and depression and other mental health issues — as there should be. I leave that to people much smarter than me.

As to the former line of thought: No one but Cornell can know what exactly his songs were about — especially given his penchant for psychedelia and vague poetry, a trait shared by many of his fellow Northwestern rockers and indeed, the alt-rock world in general.

But I do know Cornell’s music has helped me, and still helps me. Clichés be damned, I probably wouldn’t be here without it. That’s the power of great music — it makes us feel something.

I go back to when I was a teenager, sitting in my room in the dark and listening to “Fell on Black Days” on repeat. I called the song “depressing” earlier, and it is — Cornell sings about making people sick and how he’s “only faking when (he) gets it right.” But then there’s my favorite lines from the song. Seeing them typed out, the words are still pretty bleak, but they’ve always read with a glimmer of hope to me — a lesson to let go of what you cannot control.

“Don’t you lock up something

That you wanted to see fly

Hands are for shaking

No, not tying, no.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7814, bmcelhiney@bendbulletin.com