Slipknot‘s advance press tour for their new album “.5: The Gray Chapter” (out October 21st) has seen a number of new interviews with the band circulating. Frontman Corey Taylor in particular has been making the rounds. First up Taylor shot down the rumors that their new song “The Negative One” was about ousted drummer Joey Jordison. Taylor told Metal Hammer (via MetalSucks):
“Oh my fucking God! People need to fucking unplug every now and again. I did hear some shit about the video for it, like it’s supposed to be Joey, but it’s so fucking funny.”
- Advertisement -“Here’s the thing. The album is a story — not in a certain order; it jumps around — but it’s a story of this band for the last four years, from the moment Paul died to the moment we stepped out of the studio. So there are certain songs that deal with, not Joey in particular, but about the tension and trying to deal with the ugliness that we all have in us.
“The Negative One” was about me, not about Joey, and that’s why the song says, ‘Your choices are the negative one and me,’ which is the two kinda colliding together. “The Devil In I” is the same, which you’d think would be fucking apparent.
I love the fact that our fans are that passionate, but ‘Judas Priest,’ get out of the fucking basement once in a while! Log off of the fucking Twitter and go smell a flower, and just let yourself get back to a point where you go, ‘Y’know what? That’s a little crazy.”
Taylor also spoke at length with Revolver about the album, some excerpts from that chat can be found below:
On moving on without late bassist Paul Gray or fired drummer Joey Jordison:
“Yeah. We knew it was going to be hard, and that’s one of the reasons why we took our time coming back to it. Obviously without Paul, and with us splitting ways with Joey, it made it a little harder. But with this band, it’s never been an issue of, “We can’t do it”—it’s always been an issue of “How can we do it? How do we do this?” So when something like that happened, we just kind of filled in the blanks for ourselves. We made sure that everything we did made sense, and that we were doing it for the right reasons.
And we went for the music just from the standpoint of, if you want to do it, you’ve got to find a way to do it. The thing that we realized right away was, “It’s not going to be the same—so let’s not try and make it the same. Let’s just go for what our heart feels.” And once we figured that out, man, the music came really quickly; within two months, we had the basic template of what the album would be, and all that was left was to hammer out the details, which is always the best part, anyway. So yeah, it was a really good experience, man.”
On tensions between Taylor and Jim Root following Root‘s exit from Stone Sour just as work on the album commenced:
“It was difficult, at first. It put a strain between he and I for a little bit. It was one of those things where the timing just sucked. But at the same time, we knew that, on both sides, we’ve gotta do what we’ve gotta do. But at the same time, we had this amazing project that we were working on [with Slipknot], so we were able to kind of channel that and put it into what we were making, which I think in a lot of ways helped the overall aggression and emotion really get there. Because this album bites.
The riffs on this album really dig and really bite, and I think a lot of that [Stone Sour situation] fueled Jim’s writing. Not to get too much into that side of things, but obviously it wasn’t the way that we wanted the news to get out… Out of respect to Jim, I have to say that we talked about that, and we buried the hatchet there. But in a lot of ways, it is what it is. When you plan for stuff, there’s always a chance that your plans will get ruined.
I’ve been saying from Day One that the best way to get God to laugh is to announce your plans out loud. Because it’s true, and that didn’t even come from a religious standpoint—if you think it’s going to go one way, it’s totally going to go another. We dealt with it, and we just did the best we could with the situation.”
On parting ways with Joey Jordison:
“The only thing I can really say is that, in life, you’re gonna have instances where the path that you’re on leads to a T-section, and you’re either gonna go one way or another. Sometimes one person’s going one way and you’re going the other way, and as much as you can try to go in the same direction, it doesn’t always work that way. It was hard, but we did what we felt we had to do. And that’s all I can say.”
On how he thinks fans will accept the bands new drummer and bassist—reportedly Jay Weinberg and Alessandro ‘Vman’ Venturella respectively:
“I don’t know, to be honest. All we can do is what we do. You start going down that path, and it’s just another way to drive yourself crazy—trying to anticipate what a million people are going to say, especially in this day and age where everyone’s got an opinion, and you don’t really need to know what that opinion is. [Laughs] It’s the curse and the blessing of the freakin’ Internet. It is what it is.
All we can do is take the same approach we’ve always taken, where we just do what we feel is right—and either the fans are with us, or they’re not. This is us moving on, you know? You spend too much time in the shadows, and you forget what warmth feels like. You forget what real sunlight and joy feels like. This is us stepping out of the shadows and getting back on the path.”
Comments