Chris Cornell:

I wrote the lyrics in my head when we were in a van somewhere in Europe on tour. I honestly can’t remember where, exactly. But I have a vivid memory of staring out the window, looking at the countryside, and feeling pent-up. I never wrote any of the words down, but I somehow remembered them. When we finished the tour and Soundgarden returned home to Seattle, I picked up a guitar and tried to come up with music that I felt matched the essence of that song. I wanted to create this hillbilly Black Sabbath crossover that I’d never heard before. I thought that would be cool and possible. I thought, “If anyone can do it, Soundgarden can do it.” I was listening to a lot of Tom Waits at the time, and I wondered how Soundgarden could approach similar imagery and I wondered what the music would sound like. “Rusty Cage” is what I came up with.

—via Spin

Kim Thayil:

The tuning on that song was pretty nutty. It’s recorded with a wah-wah in the low position used as a filter. That was the first time we did anything like that. It was Chris’s idea; he wanted to get that weird tone that you can’t really dial in on an amp. But if you use the wah-wah as a filter, it gets an incredibly weird sound. And if you listen to that riff, especially if you’ve heard the original demos of it, it almost sounds backward.

—via Guitar School