Since 2002, Corey Taylor’s other band Stone Sour have run in parallel to Slipknot. When the band released their third album, 2010’s Audio Secrecy, Hammer met Corey in London to talk sins, sobriety and just what that new album shared with Master Of Puppets
There’s a ghost in the house. Picture this: a mansion set back on suburban Nashville streets, it’s springtime, the air conditioning’s gone out, the muggy rooms are slowly filling with wasps the size of rifle rounds, water’s seeping through the ceiling, down in the basement books and CDs are being hurled across the room by an invisible hand while up in the loft Corey Taylor looks around and there’s someone walking silently towards him, he calls out and then they’re gone.
“I swear to God, the seven plagues were descending on that place,” says Corey Taylor of the house the band occupied and rehearsed in as part of the preparation for their third album, Audio Secrecy.
“It was massive, I pulled up on the first day and it looked like a museum sitting there on this weird, well-to-do avenue. It was so big I actually got lost in there three days straight. I’d literally turn into a room thinking it was the kitchen and be standing in a bathroom I’d never seen before. And then slowly but surely the deterioration started to kick in, half of the ceiling leaked, an infestation of red wasps, ghosts walking around, we’d be in the basement rehearsing thinking, ‘What the hell’s coming next?’!”
He takes another gulp of coffee and shakes his head. We’re sitting in the bar of the plush Metropolitan Hotel off Park Lane. It’s been four years since Stone Sour’s breakthrough album, Come What(ever) May; in that time he’s been divorced and married again, got sober, written his first book and proved that he can helm two powerful and progressive metal bands in conjunction and somehow make both work. Though that wasn’t always the case.
“This album might be the first time as a band that we haven’t felt the stigma of it being a side-project, I think that’s why it’s worked so well.” He says, “There’s the other band to deal with and when you’re climbing that hill it can be tough, we did a lot of work getting to this point. Playing gigs where three-quarters of the audience are screaming ‘Slipknot!’ and you’re just like, ‘If you’re here for that then you’re at the wrong gig.’ I can remember pulling money out of my pocket onstage and giving it to someone at the front and having security escort them out. If you don’t want to be here and you want your money back, then here you fucking go, now get out, you’re gone.”
Perseverance has paid off; with producer Nick Raskulinecz’s (Alice In Chains, Foo Fighters, Deftones) help, Stone Sour’s latest album is a more complex and intriguing proposition than the previous two, and for Corey at least a more personal affair altogether.
“This is everything that we’ve been threatening to do for a long time, and I think with the success of Come What(ever) May it gave us the balls to stop fucking around and go for it,” he says, another mug of coffee gone, the waitress appearing with a fresh pot as if on cue.
“We were lucky to get Nick on board to produce, but then he was one of the people who suggested we stay at the house, so maybe it wasn’t such a great call,” he grins. “We actually took meetings with Rob Cavallo [Green Day] before we started going. Nice guy, just wasn’t where we wanted to be at the time. We played him a lot of the demos and he was like, ‘I hear two tunes.’ I was like, ‘Cheque, please! We’ll see you later.’ That to me was too much because I’ve produced myself, I knew there was potential; I knew there were more than two fucking songs. Nick gets it, but that’s not to say that he can’t be a frustrating son of a bitch and he will be the bad guy. But then he gets stoked when he hears something great and I feed off that, I love working with people like that.
“Audio Secrecy is like a blueprint for the last four years of my life; there are songs that are more about where I am now and songs about where I was three years ago. It hasn’t been the easiest time, I’ve had incredible highs, but I’ve been disillusioned with a lot of behind-the-scenes shit, I’m not even talking personally, just a lot of business stuff, personal relationships and not just in the romantic sense, but with people I’ve known for years. It’s been a little disheartening, but with this family that I have through my new wife it’s been so much easier, they’ve saved my brain more than once. Growing up, my family was just a mess, my grandmother was really the driving force of my life so she’s always been my constant. I got a lot of great cousins on her side who I grew up with, but I moved around a lot so I lost touch with them after a while. So I’ve never had that huge family that I can just embrace until now.”
His childhood is something Corey revisits in his forthcoming book, his first. Tentatively titled Seven Deadly Sins it’s part essay, part memoir, recollections and thoughts gathered together and written down over 75,000 words in a fast six weeks of work.
“Stylistically, it’s somewhere between Hunter S Thompson and Christopher Hitchens, I hope.” It’s a bold claim, but he has the good grace to smile when he says it. “My take is that the seven sins are not actually sins, but character traits, but when you amplify them they lead to sins, but the emotion itself is not a sin. I counter-balanced that with stories from my past, the general weirdness, so it’s half satirical humour, black comedy and half very serious and tinged with the dark matter from my youth. I’m on the cover in a priest’s outfit and plastic, red Devil horns nursing a glass of Scotch and a smoke. I wanted to do a book about philosophy and how most are bullshit, but it’s such a broad topic that to nail it down would take forever, sadly.”
Stone Sour were born of frustration; that and success can sometimes break a band. It almost did for Slipknot, but ultimately might have ended up saving both Corey and his regular gig. Slipknot’s first album was rightly celebrated for its diversity, an inventive mix of melody and sheer bloody-mindedness. No wonder it set the metal world on its ear.
“It almost killed us making it, but in a good way,” says Corey. “The whole reason I wanted to do Slipknot in the first place was because I had a lot of anger I was sitting on, but at the same time I wanted to try everything, so when Slipknot asked me to join I was intrigued and excited… and it was exciting, but by the time we got to make Iowa a lot of the melody went away and it was really starting to get dark.
“So me and Josh Rand started working on Project X, just writing and recording something else that wasn’t Slipknot and that’s where Bother came from, which got us the Spiderman [soundtrack]. I’m not saying my doing something else saved Slipknot, but it certainly saved me. Clown was the one who was the most hurt by my being in Stone Sour and there was a good period where we didn’t talk. I remember the first phone call we had – I’d just got home from tour and it was tense. He was like, ‘Are we doing another album?’ I said, ‘I was expecting to, what do you want to do?’ And he was like, ‘I just want to know because no one fucking tells me anything.’
“I believe there’s always going to be this symbiotic relationship between the two; like it or not they both exist and it’s nothing that can’t exist without each other, but they both help me. I was drinking two bottles of whiskey a day when we started Vol 3. I had a moment of clarity when we recorded at the Houdini mansion, I quit drinking and I started getting my shit together. That was the first step towards today for me.”
lt was a step which has brought him, for now, to Audio Secrecy. He insists he doesn’t want to unpick the cryptic-sounding title and then can’t help himself but try.
“To me, Audio Secrecy is that thing that classic tracks have, songs like Ace Of Spades, Master Of Puppets; what nuances made them the songs they are, the performance, the equipment, hell, the temperature in the room that day?” He wonders, “Is it those little bits of theorem that kind of come together? I hope I never know because I’m happy with the accidents; you make God laugh by telling him your plans.”
He considers his options; then drains his coffee cup. “I would rather live with that secret than be the guy that tries to unlock it.”
Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 209, August 2010
