Before the release of his fourth and final solo album Higher Truth in 2015, Chris Cornell released a music video for “Nearly Forgot My Broken Heart,” a track from that record. In an eerie parallel to Cornell’s suicide by hanging last month, the video depicted the late Soundgarden frontman as a death row prisoner in the old west, preparing to be hanged. Try to watch that video today, however, and you’ll have a hard time finding it: As Alternative Press reports, the Jessie Hill-directed clip seems to have been deleted from YouTube recently. Attempting to navigate to the URL prompts a message that “This video is unavailable.”
While the video did use imagery of a noose–you can see a screenshot via Stereogum’s 2015 post about the video here–it did not depict an actual hanging of Cornell’s character. A brief plot synopsis via AP:
The video stars Cornell and Eric Roberts playing prisoners about to be hanged in an old western town. Cornell marches towards the noose and it is placed around his neck, as a young boy, played by Cornell’s son Christopher Cornell, watches. An onlooker (Elena Satine) distracts the hangman, Cornell’s noose is sabotaged by the executioner’s assistant so he survives his hanging, and he is forced into marriage with the woman who sabotaged his hanging. The video ends with the other prisoner about to be hanged and the onlooker about to play her part again.
It’s unclear exactly when the video was removed from YouTube. A Variety interview published last month with Roberts, Cornell’s “Nearly Forgot My Broken Heart” costar, includes a (now-broken) embed of the clip, indicating the deletion probably happened sometime after that.
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A lyric video for the song is still available on YouTube and Vevo, which you can watch below.
