Sometimes, Toni Cornell listens to a recording of when she joined her dad, the late musician Chris Cornell, onstage at New York City’s Beacon Theatre to sing a cover of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” In video footage from that evening, she’s 11 years old, in a button-up blouse and ponytail, swaying beside her father, who accompanies her on guitar. Her voice is strong and clear, even though it’s her first real time in front of an audience.
Chris admitted in an interview around that time that, though he was nervous with phone cameras in their faces and the blinding stage lights, his daughter had no stage fright at all. Her mom had begged her not to do it, to maybe perform on smaller stages first. But they’d been singing together at home, and though Toni was barely a preteen, she already knew that music was and would be her whole life. She used to steal her dad’s iPod just to listen to his cover of “Redemption Song,” which she also performed at a first-grade talent show. Looking back at the Beacon show now, she remembers that she actually was scared, but the fun of it, the love of the music, overtook the fear.
She knew even then how special it was for her to be up there with her dad singing one of their favorite songs. Less than two years later, Chris, one of the iconic artists of ‘90s grunge music, known for leading rock bands Soundgarden and Audioslave, died at age 52.
“I was 12 years old,” Cornell tells Teen Vogue in her first interview as an adult. “I was in disbelief because I had seen him that morning. It was just a shock, and I think we were all in denial for a really long time." She recalls walking by a Kentucky Derby hat store they’d frequented and snapping a picture to send to him. The jolt of remembering.
A few months after his death, Cornell performed Leonard Cohen’s anthemic “Hallelujah” in tribute to her dad and Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington on Good Morning America. In the segment, the camera pans over an emotional audience, crying freely, hands clasped as if in prayer.
“I was trying so hard not to cry,” Cornell says of that performance. “It was so hard because I was seeing the people that were not just touched by what we were doing, but they were touched by my dad's art, by Chester's art, and it really hit me … They had their relationship with my father and his music, and that is also a special relationship that he had with his fans, and honestly, his fans were there for us, and I think it was beautiful.”
Now 21, Cornell is venturing into her professional music career, continuing her dad’s legacy and building one of her own. She’s thinking about her performance style, her relationship to fame, her music, and everything that might come next. She’s an artist who was taught from almost the moment she was born to make her own rules, to follow her own passions, to never be obliged to stick to one genre or one way of being.
She once dreamed of being just like her dad when she grew up. Cornell smiles, “He would tell me, ‘No, Toni, you're going to be just like you.’”
You know the kinds of stories you hear so many times that the details blur around the edges, smoothed over with time? That’s how Cornell remembers her parents’ romantic origin story. They were in Paris, and her mom, Vicky, was running PR for a party for her dad. “My dad just knew. It's one of those rom-com things,” Cornell says. “It was love at first sight, and she apparently did not want to give him a chance at first, and then was like, ‘Okay, fine. I fell for him.’”
The family was incorporated into Chris Cornell’s touring lifestyle. Born in 2004, Toni grew up in the nomadic landscape of a musician's life. Her family was tight-knit: Picture Full House, with her younger brother, parents, grandparents, and uncle all living together. They lived mostly in New York, or Florida when her dad was writing, or LA when he was recording. In between, the siblings would sometimes attend school in Rome during European tour dates.
“After losing my dad, I had a huge, huge, huge support system, and I was just raised with a lot of love and a lot of present people in my life,” she says, adding that she’s very close to her mom. “We were always together, even when we weren't. And [my dad] was always there. That foundation of love is definitely something that helped me heal after losing my dad.”
It was a spontaneous, always-on-the-move lifestyle that Toni loved and thrived in. Her family made an effort to immerse themselves in the environment of wherever they were. She was also drawn to musical theater and writing poetry and stories. She remembers her first-grade teacher calling her parents in to read “a kind of dark” poem she’d written about rain. From there, her family encouraged her love of music and capturing vivid emotion. At 10, she learned how to play guitar.
In 2019, Cornell released her first song, “Far Away Places,” a moving ballad that she wrote and her father produced for the film of the same name. And her top song on Spotify is currently a cover of Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” also performed with her dad.
Now, Cornell is studying social sciences in her third year at NYU, while living in LA and making music with producer Dave Hamelin (who has worked with Beyoncé and Noah Cyrus, among others), which she started releasing last year. The new music, including recent single, “Campari,” is a major energy shift. (Teen Vogue has an exclusive premiere of the “Campari” music video below.)
Cornell's three songs released over the past year are punchy art-pop-rock — messy and brash like a true 20-something. They reflect her growing taste, her playlists full of the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Sex Pistols, Broadway shows like Rocky Horror and Phantom of the Opera, and more recently, movie soundtracks (she’s been listening to a lot of Danny Elfman).
“Honestly ‘Campari’ and ‘Little B*tch’ were a turning point for me in terms of writing because I find it very easy to write about pain and sadness. Those songs were very experimental and I didn't know I had that in me because a lot of what I did was very ballady, poetic, pretty,” she says. “But I was like, you know what? Why can't I discover the side of me that's just a young 21-year-old? Everybody goes through horrible things. Trauma is relative, pain is relative, but it's part of the human experience going through it all, whether it's a sh*tty ex or something that's definitely a million times worse than that.”
Expect more music from Toni Cornell in the future, but maybe not on any set timeline, and maybe not organized in an album format just yet. She’s deeply unconcerned with music industry norms or pressures to make TikTok hits. Instead, the focus is on releasing music she’s had pent up for years, and in growing as an artist and performer.
Just a few weeks ago, Cornell played her first show with her music at Hotel Cafe in LA and got to see people react in real time to her songs. It invigorated her, reminded her of why she’s pursuing this career.
In addition to developing her sound and figuring out where she goes from here, Cornell is also thinking about fame, how she experienced it after her dad’s death, and what it might feel like to experience it on something more akin to her own terms.
There was and is a tension in her and her family’s private and public grief. The GMA performance was beautiful in its purity and support, but she’s been through the dark side of that exposure too. “This was a tragedy that was obviously very public and that wasn't my choice,” Cornell says. “I was severely cyberbullied for years afterwards … I did have to grow up really quickly against my will.”
That negativity, however, has ironically informed her appreciation for the fans that get it. “Fame is your music connecting with people, and then people being able to see themselves in your music,” Cornell says. She talks about her song “Little B*tch," for example, and how it was borne out of frustration. She almost didn’t release it. “I just needed to go into the studio and drop F-bombs and yell profanities into a microphone and talk about a sh*tty guy,” she says. “I made that for myself. It's such a personal thing, but I think that's what's important about it. Some young lady is going to need to hear this and scream in her car.”
As Cornell releases more music, she will surely do more interviews. People will ask about her dad, about their family, about how you ever recover from that kind of grief. She’s ready. He is, after all, the “biggest part” of why she makes music.
“Honestly, I love talking about him. Maybe a couple of years ago it would've been harder for me to do that,” Cornell says. “The idea of grief, at the end of the day, it's just love. At first, it's pain and it's awful, and you think it's unbearable, but you learn how to live with it, and it turns into you honoring and remembering someone you love.”
