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Interview
by SashaS
21-8-2002
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| StoneSour and no mask in sight |
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Sanity regained
Slipknot’s Corey Taylor on side order
Some people need more holidays, some more sex, some procrastinate 11 years to make an album (like Guns N’Roses), some need to make music constantly… Corey Taylor, singer with Slipknot, belongs to the last group of artists and that’s why, instead to be resting some six months before Slipknot get cutting another album, he’ll be travelling the world to perform songs that StoneSour have recorded on their self-titled album.
StoneSour is a band of which Corey and Slipknot’s guitarist Jim Root were members before joining the biggest band to come out of Iowa. Corey was the first to leave guitarist Josh Rand, bassist Shawn Economaki and drummer Joel Ekman behind in 1997, followed by Root a year later which left StoneSour feeling like an unfinished life’s chapter.
The rebirth started as an innocuous songwriting comedown in 2000 when Rand approached Taylor with a view of writing some songs together.
“As soon as we had the songs written,” Corey Taylor explains, “I immediately thought of the guys in StoneSour. It was so close to the style we used to play years ago. And I thought it would be good to issue another album under the band’s name, we’d recorded two in the ‘90s, only released locally.”
A rush of...
Alike the cocktail they are named after – 1 part whiskey, a splash or orange juice and sour mix – StoneSour is 1 part pure rock-pumping adrenaline, a splash of melody and a good doze of darkness added to the mix. There is a further ‘Knot guest on the album, DJ Sid Wilson, on a couple of tracks but this is truly Taylor’s showcase and he’s taken it head, heart and soul fully on.
The album offers diverse songs and you sing much more than with Slipknot…
“Thank you, thank you very much. That was the whole point of doing this, it wasn’t like I was going to recreate what Slipknot were doing. I wanted variety, to inform people there are different things I can do.”
One of the interesting influences on your album is Alice in Chains, the grungers whose lead singer recently passed on?
“Man, I think they are an incredibly underrated band. I love that band and am always proud to write a song in that style. But, that’s not surprising to me, I’ve always written like that, ever since 1992, when we first formed the band. We really never set out to have a certain genre we subscribe to, we just wrote songs we liked… And people liked it, or didn’t, which didn’t matter, let’s get to the next person. We didn’t really give a damn, to be honest with you.”
Vacation from mayhem
Among number of rocking tracks on ‘StoneSour’ is ‘Bother’, more introspective and catchier than Nickelback, the song that also found place on the ‘Spider-Man’ soundtrack; the concluding cut, ‘Omega’, is a spoken-word item that would make Henry Rollins proud. Just to show, Taylor formulates ‘ambition’, “that there is more to me than meets the eye…”
Or the mask, which is off for StoneSour?
“Mask is part of Slipknot’s show and I’ll continue wearing it because that’s a huge part of who we are. But, with StoneSour, you know, if you want something to stand on its own, you can’t have the connotations of the other band you are in. I want StoneSour to be looked at as a band itself, just kick-ass good band. Why would I then do another band, a completely different band, and wear a mask, it wouldn’t really be cool, it would be idiotic!”
Is StoneSour vacation from mayhem, then?
“You certainly hit it on the head… When people hear that I’m going to put an album out, I want them to think – what’s it gonna sound like? I want to keep challenging people and see what happens. That’s my intention, you can call it an ambition.”
“I’m glad to have it (mask) off, for time being… The mask, it is stifling… It really puts you in a mind-set to kill somebody. Once you wrap that f**king thing on, you really slip out of sanity. Not only you are putting this f**king thing on and getting ready to go out there and do 75 minutes of total madness! The heat is stifling and it is completely physical and cardio-vascular exercise…”
But not breaking from work because you are touring?
“Yes, there is a tour coming up; first, I have to play open-air dates with Slipknot and then StoneSour will tour, playing to as many people as possible. We start American and Canadian tours on 27 September and then, we gonna get over to Europe, Asia, Australia and, hopefully, South America. We’ll be everywhere where we can possibly get to.”
“We expect to visit Europe around October, November, for two or three weeks; look out for it, we gonna rock you!”
And Slipknot?
“After the summer dates we’ll be on a hiatus and I have time until next year… We’ll then get back together and cut the next Slipknot album.”
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Slipknot play Carling Festival at Reading and Leeds as well as Gig On The Green, Glasgow, this Bank Holiday.
SashaS
21-8-2002
StoneSour’s album ‘StoneSour’ is released 26 August on Roadrunner
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