Songfacts®:

• After the breakup of Soundgarden in 1997, Chris Cornell released his first album, Euphoria Morning, in 1999. "Can't Change Me" leads off the album and was the only single released from the set.
  
  Cornell explained the meaning of the song on MTV's Making the Video: "It's kind of a sad discovery that this singer is involved with this person that has amazing powers to help people and change things positively, and he's realizing that none of it is really rubbing off on him."
• Cornell sings:
  
  She's going to change the world
  But she can't change me
  
  He told MTV News that this could be interpreted as either defiance or discovery. "Maybe there are things he'd like to change about himself," he said of the character in the song.
• Johan Renck, whose credits include "Love At First Sight" for Kylie Minogue and "Blackstar" by David Bowie, directed the music video, where the Portuguese actress Ana Cristina de Oliveira plays a human torch, setting fire to whatever she touches. When Cornell catches fire, he douses the flames by taking a dip in a pool of water, since she can't change him.
  
  Visual effects software wasn't very good with fire at the time, so the flames were essentially composited onto the shots.
• Two members of the band Eleven, Alain Johannes and Natasha Shneider, played on the song and worked on the recording. Johannes and Shneider co-produced the Euphoria Morning album with him.
• The song placed at #102 on the Hot 100 but made #5 on the Mainstream Rock Songs chart and #7 on the Alternative Songs chart.
• This earned a Grammy nomination for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance but lost to "American Woman" by Lenny Kravitz.
• Cornell recorded a French version of the song that was included on the deluxe version of Euphoria Morning.