Pop Music : Garden-Variety? No : After the breakup of Soundgarden two years ago, Chris Cornell reemerges with a new style as a solo artist--and with a different perspective on life.

Grunge was the most tumultuous, inspiring and misunderstood movement in rock since punk. For all its sonic assault and deeply rooted alienation, the ‘90s rock sound reflected much of the best idealism of ‘60s rock.

Along with Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell was one of grunge’s main voices. The best songs he wrote with Soundgarden were dark, powerful tales that captured the uncertainty of young people who felt trapped in an age of lowered expectations.

The irony of the grunge movement was that almost everyone over the 15-to-25 age of the Seattle-spawned genre’s primary audience was turned off by what they saw as negativity in the music and whining by Cobain and others about the pressures of stardom.

Now that grunge has given way to an even darker style of rock anger--the rap-rock of such far less artful bands as Korn and Limp Bizkit--many grunge detractors can begin to see the purpose and idealism at the heart of the movement, which began winding down after Cobain’s suicide in 1994.

After selling 10 million albums in the U.S. in its 10-year career, a drained Soundgarden called it quits in 1997. But a refreshed Cornell, whose early musical heroes ranged from the Beatles to Otis Redding, returns Sept. 21 with his first solo album. “Euphoria Morning” is a collection that draws on a far wider series of influences than Soundgarden, including traces of R&B; and introspective singer-songwriter styles.

One of rock’s most commanding singers, Cornell will introduce the new music on a six-city tour that starts Sept. 13 in Boston and includes stops Sept. 21 and 22 at the Henry Fonda Theatre in Hollywood. A more extensive U.S. tour will follow.

With “Can’t Change Me,” a track from the album, already getting strong airplay on rock stations, Cornell, 35, looks back on the tensions and triumphs of the grunge era--including the reasons for the whining--and talks about the changes in his music.

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Question: Grunge came along at a time when mindless hard-rock seemed to have a lock on the charts. How was grunge able to break through that stranglehold?

Answer: I think [rock fans] were looking for a change. I can imagine what it must have been like being a kid sitting around in, say, Minneapolis, watching the 15th straight video by Great White or Cinderella or another one of those bands, and suddenly Nirvana comes on. Rather than seeing a bunch of people who are celebrating a lifestyle that kid will never have, suddenly he sees guys who look like they are in history class at his school. . . . Just an instant identification with people who seemed like you, playing music that is real, not just some cartoon stuff.

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Q: How exciting was it being part of that movement? Was there a lot of civic pride?

A: It wasn’t about Seattle as a place. It had more to do with these individual people I knew. It’s an amazing thing to have any success in your life, but to come from such humble beginnings and have all these friends come from these same humble beginnings--and then for all of us to be able to sit in a room and talk about it at the same time was pretty amazing.

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Q: You say it was exciting to be able to sit around and talk about the success, but one of the things a lot of people associate with the grunge movement was whining. Why did everyone have such a hard time dealing with success?

A: It is hard to explain it because there were a lot of factors involved. Part of it had to do with the fact that a lot of us grew up on the punk ethic, which made you suspicious of stardom, but also a lot of it had to do with the fact that you were coming out of one of the most obnoxious periods of commercial music, which was the ‘80s commercial metal period.

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Q: But what did that have to do with you? You were causing all that commercial metal music to disappear. Why wasn’t there a joy in that?

A: A lot of the bands from Seattle had hard-rock influences and were immediately pushed into the same place as these other bands. A photographer who is taking a picture of me for a magazine cover is making no distinction between me and the singer of, say, Cinderella, and all of a sudden you become terrified that you aren’t really any different--that you have ended up being the enemy.

So many of those ‘80s bands used their success as a promotional tactic, a gimmick--and that was very distasteful. I don’t know how many videos I saw in the late ‘80s from rock bands where they appear at a concert in a helicopter or they jump out of a limousine or there are stripper models dancing on the top of expensive cars.

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Q: That’s a lot like some hip-hop videos today, isn’t it?

A: Yes, there are so many videos of a guy sitting in a room counting hundred-dollar bills, smirking into the camera, literally saying, “My life is better than yours.” That attitude was obnoxious to me.

Another thing to remember about that period is that it is hard to deal with everything that is coming at you once your career starts taking off. When someone is riding the crest of success and fame, there is no time to celebrate the good times. It’s not like suddenly you win a lottery ticket and you are off to Barbados for six weeks. You are running around the world playing music, which is great, but you are doing all these other things, and it’s easy to get exhausted emotionally. The travel itself takes a toll on you mentally that you didn’t expect.

There are plenty of stories throughout rock history where the most confused, self-destructive people were having the worst period of their life when they were the most successful. That’s when they really flipped out and fell apart. They weren’t ready for it or, for some reason, it was so foreign to them and so terrifying that they become self-destructive or they try to avoid reality by doing drugs or whatever.

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Q: Do you think Kurt’s death took much of the heart out of the movement, or at least any remaining innocence?

A: Sure, I think everyone was affected by it. . . . You never know what the real reasons were. One idea that kept circulating was that [success] killed Kurt, . . . that it was too much too fast, that it was too much attention, that it was the industry itself, that it was all the commercialism, . . . but I don’t know. It could have been something that would have happened if no one ever heard of Nirvana or grunge. But it certainly did make us all pause and think about just what was going on. It definitely was the end of an era.

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Q: What about the decision to end Soundgarden? Very few bands ever call it quits when they are still at or near their commercial peak. Most of them hold on to the very end and then some.

A: The thing we didn’t want to do ever was be in a situation where we were going to make a record where we weren’t all going to be totally enthusiastic about it. And there came a time after the 1996 tour where we took some time away from each other and we all came to the decision that we were at that point.

That’s the kind of thing that bands always say in interviews but then forget about, so I’m pleased that we were able to actually do it. I’ve been amazed over the years at bands that keep touring and making records until they turn into these horrible products of nostalgia. That’s not worth it. . . . It’s not worth compromising the history of the band.

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Q: What about the new music? A lot of people start solo careers and they end up just copying their own sound, but you have moved into new areas. There’s more subtlety and range in the music and more introspectiveness to the lyrics.

A: A lot of bands seem to be the [vision] of a single member who writes the songs, even decides how the instruments should sound. But that’s not the way we worked. Our sound was developed by piecing together the musical elements that we had in common. But there were sides of all of us that didn’t fit in Soundgarden, so we just kind of put those aside. You heard some of those elements in my music in [side projects] I did over the years, and now in the album.

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Q: There’s still a lot of darkness in the songs, a lot of struggling with depression, but there is also a greater sense of optimism.

A: I think everyone has got to expect to go through periods of depression; it’s a normal state, and ultimately you learn to work within that. That’s part of getting older and benefiting from experience. The idea in [the album’s song] “Steel Rain” is someone falling into this unexpected depression, but realizing it’s OK rather than letting it destroy him.

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Q: I’d think one of the hardest things to do in a hard-rock band is deal with the issue of growing up. Your audience is so young, and there is such an emphasis on relating to the rock ‘n’ roll spirit. Did you ever struggle with that?

A: There was someone in a band we toured with years ago who said I appeared to him to be a person who was determined to grow up in an industry that pays me to be an adolescent. I didn’t really necessarily agree with him at the time, because I felt that a lot of the things I enjoy doing now are very similar to the things I did when I was much younger. At the same time, there are songs on this album that I would have felt uncomfortable putting on a Soundgarden album, because I don’t think they would have fit in with the identity of the band.

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Q: “Wave Goodbye” is a very poignant song that sounds like one of the songs you’re talking about. You wrote it after Jeff Buckley’s death, right? In some ways, though, the song seems to be about a lot of losses, maybe even Kurt’s.

A: Well, there have certainly been less deaths [in my life] than some people, but more than I would expect when it comes to young people. When someone dies when they’re old and they have had a long life, I know it can be horrible and you miss them, but it’s still not the same type of tragedy. Also when you have someone die unexpectedly, you don’t have those periods of seeing that it is coming and creating some sort of closure if there was an argument or something you had said to them. Those are hard things to deal with because you can’t talk to them or can’t take it back.

Ultimately, I think you obsess on those things and it makes you grateful for the time you have. It makes you feel lucky to be here in this situation, lucky that I get to continue to make music and that people seem to still be interested in hearing it. I’m just sorry so many others aren’t able to still have the same blessings.

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Chris Cornell plays Sept. 21-22 at the Henry Fonda Theatre, 6126 Hollywood Blvd., 8 p.m. $20. (323) 480-3232.