Mike McCready walked onto the turf at Lumen Field on Wednesday night carrying a Fender Stratocaster worn down to bare wood, and played the national anthem alone in front of a sold-out Seattle crowd. An hour later he was back on the same field, standing in with Soundgarden while Taylor Momsen sang the parts Chris Cornell used to sing. It was one of the stranger and more moving nights a Seattle musician has had in public. Most of the country only saw half of it.
The occasion was the NFL’s 2026 season opener, a rematch of the Super Bowl the Seahawks won 29-13 over the New England Patriots back in February. As American Songwriter noted, the entire music programme for the evening was built around the city’s own history rather than around whoever happened to be charting: Luke Bryan headlined a pregame concert, McCready took the anthem, and Soundgarden — the band that arguably invented the sound the rest of the world came to call grunge — took halftime.
The band that came back
Soundgarden’s surviving members are Kim Thayil on guitar, Matt Cameron on drums and Ben Shepherd on bass. Cornell died in 2017, and for years the question of whether the band could or should play again sat unanswered. The answer they have arrived at is a careful one: they play, but they bring in a singer who is explicitly filling a space rather than replacing anyone.
Momsen, of The Pretty Reckless, has now done that job several times. She sang with the band at their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, and the halftime booking — first reported by Pollstar in late August and confirmed by Billboard — put her in front of a stadium. The set was short, as halftime sets are: ThePRP reported a medley built around “Outshined” and “Spoonman”.
McCready’s involvement was not a corporate pairing. Members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden have been close since before Pearl Jam existed, and in an interview with Seahawks.com’s John Boyle published the day before the game, McCready described himself as “kind of like Soundgarden’s biggest fan” — recalling that when the band rehearsed in Seattle he “went down there and brought them pizzas just so I could hang out.”
He was blunt about what the night meant. “It’s incredibly special, it’s incredibly poignant,” he told Boyle. “It’s intense, you want to do it right.” Of playing with Thayil, Cameron and Shepherd again, he added: “I’ll play with those guys anywhere on the planet.”
He was also, by his own account, nervous. McCready has played Hendrix-inspired instrumental versions of the anthem at Seahawks and Mariners games for years, and it still gets to him. “It’s way scary in a way, because I want to do it right and I don’t want to mess it up,” he said.
What NBC did, and did not, show
Here is where the night curdled for a lot of people watching at home. According to ThePRP, a Soundgarden representative had indicated ahead of time that the halftime performance would not air as part of NBC’s broadcast, and in the event little to no footage of the set made it to screen. Viewers who had specifically tuned in for it went to social media in numbers to complain.
It is worth being precise about this, because the accounts differ in tone. This was not a last-minute decision to cut away from a band mid-song; the indication that it would not be televised appears to have existed before kickoff. Nor is it unusual — regular-season NFL halftimes are almost never broadcast, and the network typically fills the window with studio analysis. What made this one land badly is that the NFL, the Seahawks and the band had all promoted the appearance for a fortnight, which left a sizeable audience expecting to see something the broadcast was never going to carry.
The reaction to the anthem split along different lines again. Newsweek and Men’s Journal both characterised the response as largely enthusiastic and noted the inevitable Hendrix comparisons — McCready is, after all, a Seattle guitarist playing a distorted Star-Spangled Banner. Total Pro Sports led instead on the objectors, a contingent who felt an instrumental reading was the wrong call for the anthem full stop. Both things were true at once, which is roughly what happens every time a guitarist plays it.
What happens next
The more consequential Soundgarden news is still ahead. A studio album built from the band’s final recordings with Cornell is in post-production, with Thayil telling ThePRP that “if you can imagine a lullaby paired with psychedelia, that’s kind of what’s going on there.” He also indicated that label, production and promotional questions are still being worked through, which is the sort of detail that tends to mean a release date is not imminent.
For now, what exists is a phone-camera record of a few minutes in Seattle: three men who have been playing together since the 1980s, a singer carrying an impossible brief, and a guitarist from the band down the road who spent the evening doing two jobs and, by the sound of it, would have done a third. The stadium saw all of it. Everyone else got the anthem.
