Devin Townsend‘s current passion project is what he calls a ‘$10 million cock symphony’ for which he has actively been working on recent months with an undisclosed composer. He recently told Noisey:
“I’m here at Sony tonight to pitch something I need ten million bucks for! The whole show is a metaphor for sex and power, and the idea of it all being related to some sort of God who’s ultimately futile. But it’s this symphony with all these cocks and vaginas and death and it’s gotta be so over-the-top, with symphonies and choirs and it’s got to include the best of the best and it’s so fucking expensive!
- Advertisement -I’d like to not think about money, but what I want to do is just get so much money, absurd amounts of money, and just put it all into this thing that’s a fundamentally unsellable spectacle, but make it so palatable that halfway through you’ll just be like, ‘The fuck are we watching here?’
I love that idea of absurdity and spectacle coming together. ‘The Retinal Circus‘ was like a high-school play; Z² and the Royal Albert thing was fun, but again, it was more like a rock show. But what I wanna do now is just blow things up, right? So I need ten million bucks…”
He also spoke of whether or not it boosts his ego when fans ask him to reunite Strapping Young Lad:
“Sometimes, until I see live videos! There was nobody there for our last American tour; that was one of our least-attended tours, there were like fifty people in these 500 and 600 capacity venues. But it’s looked at with rose-tinted glasses by people who didn’t see it and it’s built up to be something more than it was, so they think we must’ve been the best. We clearly weren’t!
I wouldn’t reform Strapping for the same reason I never did coke or heroin, because I know myself enough to know what’s good and healthy for me. Life is literally for living, so why would you want to spend time being a martyr for people? It just seems like that mentality is contrary to anything creatively astute.
But at the same time, the fact that people pay attention to what I do and keep asking why I don’t do Strapping again? Yeah, that’s flattering, especially considering nobody liked it when I put the first record out. It was just Blackadder meets poorly-produced Fear Factory.”
Getting more serious, he also shared his thoughts on meet and greets and the finances it takes for the Devin Townsend Project to tour:
“I have two thoughts on the matter and they cancel each other out, so that kinda sucks. The music industry is really difficult. The overhead for me to do this is fucking crazy; we have to pay around $14,000 a month just to function. We didn’t tour for a year so I had to come up with fourteen grand a month just to keep everything going, then when we do tour, it’s fucking expensive. $1,000 per person to fly shit class from Vancouver, too. A lot of the times, fans may think bands are taking the piss by simply doing a meet-and-greet, but if we don’t do them we simply can’t do what we’re doing. It’s not like we do them then get a bonus at the end of the tour.
On the other side of it, if you’re in the band and you’re hypersensitive to people’s energy, like I believe I am, meet-and-greets fucking beat the shit out of you. Not because you don’t want to meet people, but because in order to do it correctly, you really have to invest yourself and be present and ready to talk to people and sometimes accept hyperbolic praise or criticism, and you have to be emotionally resilient enough to not let either… I mean, it’s about them.
They’re paying for a moment and your job is to be present and that’s really challenging on tour. If you think meet-and-greets are fundamentally stupid then you’re never not gonna think that. Some bands are like, ‘Fuck that, you can come meet me at the bar.’ I never go to the bar and if I am at the bar, please don’t talk to me because I’m there to hang out with my friends. We try to do the best with our packages, but at the same time there’s still people who are critical of it.”
For a whole lot more from Townsend about his lofty symphony goals and more, head to Noisey.
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