Photo Credit: Chris Cornell
Chris Cornell is riding high after splitting from Audioslave earlier this year.

"I'm willing to bet I'm the tallest male that's ever done (a James Bond song) of any nationality," the 6-foot-2 former Soundgarden and Audioslave frontman says confidently. "I know Paul McCartney's shorter than that. I don't think anyone in Duran Duran comes to 6 (foot) 2."

When Pulse gently points out that the members of the Norwegian band a-ha might have him beat, he pauses.

"Yeah, they're like Nordic," he agrees. "They could all be 6 (foot) 2."

Thankfully, we haven't burst his bubble. Cornell, 43, is riding high after parting ways with Audioslave earlier this year, and he's clearly enjoying the freedom that comes from calling the shots all by himself — right down to picking the songs he'll sing on any given night during his current tour, which stops in Sayreville Wednesday night.

"(I'm) going to really pretty intense extremes, from super-aggressive hard rock songs to just me and an acoustic guitar, doing three or four songs," he says.

But let's get back to that Bond song for a minute. Cornell says he just "got lucky" when he was selected to write and record what would become "You Know My Name."

"I think they just thought, 'What the hell?' " he says. "I think they were already taking such a risk on the actor that they wanted to continue that theme with the song ... They decided I was the guy and said, "Go do whatever you want. Don't worry about any other Bond song that's ever existed because we don't care. We want something fresh.' "

While the song isn't on the "Casino Royale" soundtrack, it does appear on Cornell's latest solo release, "Carry On," which also features something his fans probably aren't expecting of him: a slow, acoustic cover of Michael Jackson's monster hit, "Billie Jean."

The decision to include that came as a result of Cornell "getting more and more into what would make less and less sense, and the challenge of turning that into something that was me."

Although fans might be shocked by his decision, Cornell says he isn't sure how Jackson feels.

"I've never met him, and he doesn't call me," he says.

In addition to his duties as a husband, father to three children and rocker, Cornell also has recently branched out into the restaurant business (he opened Black Calavados in Paris last year). He's also extremely concerned about the environment and took part in the Live Earth concert in Hamburg, Germany.

"That's something that I've been stressed about since I was 18 or 19," he says, recalling that at about the same time he realized the landscape around his native Seattle — and that of Canada, where he used to vacation — was changing, and not for the better. Then the first Gulf War happened. Cornell decided that maybe he could do something to help break the United States' dependency on oil.

"I stopped driving and started riding a bicycle," he says, adding that his decision was more political than environmental. "I felt (like), 'You know what? I don't want to go there. I don't want to point a gun at anybody. Because of that, maybe I should be rethinking things.' "

It was a bittersweet time for Cornell. He had just finished writing all of the lyrics for Soundgarden's breakthrough album, "Badmotorfinger," when Operation Desert Storm happened.

"At this exciting point in my life, I'm about to put out this record that I knew was going to be listened to by a lot of people. In this moment, all of my dreams are coming true and at the same time, I'm feeling really guilty about this other thing that's happening."

Environmentally, things have only gotten worse. He recounts driving 65 mph along the carpool lane of Route 405 in Los Angeles and "I see the other four or five lanes to my right in a standstill because there are literally thousands of SUVs with one person in each one. And I'm thinking, 'My God.' "

That's a far cry from Paris, where Cornell now spends half of his time. There, "you'll see men in business suits riding scooters ... it's proof that you can do it, whatever your reason might be.

"Dramatic climate change and its effects, and trying to slow that down and eventually stop it is a great reason (to make a change). It's a better reason than bad traffic, I think."