Deep Pencil - the musings of Morgan Bell

It was a long time coming and I think a lot of things led me to do it, the main thing just kind of being impatient with myself, not feeling like that was particularly me, and in the long run bad habits sort of slowly slow you down.

I'd always felt that I was someone who was prolific, and good at what I did, and that that side of my life, being the musician, the songwriter, the performer, theres so much in there that I didn’t really need anything else.

But also I was sort of always known as the “together” one from like the different bands that we hung out with, I was the one that was focused, and I was reliable, and when I stopped being that, when I stopped being focused, I stopped being reliable, that went on for awhile, a good five years of that, and I just got fed up with it, one day I think I just woke up and I thought, im not this person, this is not me, I have absolutely no patience for this person that im becoming.

“When I was touring with Soundgarden for Superunknown, that was really the first time I really started actually drinking on tour. I never did before; I drank a lot, but not on tour, and I didn’t really smoke on tour either. I was really focussed, you know, the show was important and my lifestyle was pretty clean.

And then in 1994… Kim [Thayil] and Ben [Shepherd] and I just sort of started to get a little bit crazier in terms of our overall behaviour, you know, years of being on the road and being in a band and whatever. I started going onstage from being a little bit buzzed to being absolutely wasted, and that changed my personality onstage.

I remember very specifically. All through my Euphoria Morning tour I was drunk onstage or drinking onstage, one of the two. It was a little bit weird going back to being completely sober and going out with Audioslave and not even really having the memory of what I used to feel like or be like onstage. And I think I guess I dealt with it by singing the song and just kind of concentrating on that. Like, I’m going to go out and stand in front of the mic and sing the song good -- and then whatever happens after that, I get sort of swept up in the song and it’s all pretty natural. And I’m still that way.”

"I went through a serious crisis with depression where I didn't eat a whole meal every day. I was just kind of shutting down. I eventually found that the only way out of that was to change virtually everything in my life. That was a very frightening thing to do, but it was worthwhile. ... "