"Fell on Black Days" | ||||
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Single by Soundgarden | ||||
from the album Superunknown | ||||
B-side | "Kyle Petty, Son of Richard" / "Fell on Black Days" (video version) | |||
Released | March 8, 1994 | |||
Format | CD single, Vinyl | |||
Recorded | July–September 1993 at Bad Animals Studio, Seattle | |||
Genre | Grunge | |||
Length | 4:42 | |||
Label | A&M | |||
Songwriter(s) | Chris Cornell | |||
Producer(s) | Michael Beinhorn, Soundgarden | |||
Soundgarden singles chronology | ||||
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Superunknown track listing | ||||
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"Fell on Black Days" is a song by the American rock band Soundgarden. Written by frontman Chris Cornell, "Fell on Black Days" was released as the fifth single from the band's fourth studio album, Superunknown (1994). The song peaked at number four on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. The song was included on Soundgarden's 1997 greatest hits album, A-Sides and the 2010 compilation Telephantasm as the Superunknown version on the single disk version and the video version on the Deluxe Edition.
"Fell on Black Days" is a grunge song, and was written by frontman Chris Cornell. The time signature of the song is in 6/4. Cornell said, "On 'Fell on Black Days; the drums are totally straight, even though the riff is in six, so it doesn't feel quirky at all." Guitarist Kim Thayil has said that Soundgarden usually did not consider the time signature of a song until after the band had written it, and said that the use of odd meters was "a total accident."
Cornell on "Fell on Black Days":
"Fell on Black Days" was like this ongoing fear I've had for years ... It's a feeling that everyone gets. You're happy with your life, everything's going well, things are exciting—when all of a sudden you realize you're unhappy in the extreme, to the point of being really, really scared. There's no particular event you can pin the feeling down to, it's just that you realize one day that everything in your life is fucked!
"Fell on Black Days" was released as a single in 1994 in various versions with the previously unreleased B-sides "Kyle Petty, Son of Richard", "Motorcycle Loop" and "Fell on Black Days (demo)". The "demo" version is in fact a completely different song, featuring different lyrics (with only the chorus containing similarities to "Fell on Black Days") and different music, with considerably heavier Drop DGDGBE guitar tuning. Soundgarden performed the "demo" version live on Pearl Jam's January 8, 1995, Self-Pollution satellite radio broadcast, a four-and-a-half hour long pirate broadcast out of Seattle which was available to any radio stations that wanted to carry it. The "demo" version was retitled "Black Days III" for the Superunknown 20th Anniversary reissues and appeared on the Deluxe/Super Deluxe editions.