Ann Wilson comments on how Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington "seemed to resemble each other" in a new interview with Rolling Stone.
Promoting her upcoming album of covers, Immortal, which features the Heart singer's interpretation of her friend Cornell's Audioslave song "I Am the Highway," she admits she wasn't that surprised to hear about his suicide. "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.”
Wilson says she didn't actually meet Bennington until after Cornell's death, when she and Linkin Park appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on the same night. He sent someone to her dressing room to ask her to come and speak to him.
She recalls that she went in and "he was really a mess -- anxious and sad and had to go onstage in a minute." She thinks that "Chris’s departure hit [Chester] hard because he recognized the impulse." She felt "a lot of fear there" and 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.”
You can find Wilson's version of "I Am the Highway" on Soundcloud. Immortal comes out September 14th.