Corey Taylor
Slipknot frontman Corey "#8" Taylor led the band's angsty horror-metal to the top of the charts while wearing ghoulish masks and leather S&M gear. But with the future of Slipknot unknown following the death of bassist Paul Gray, Taylor is focusing on his other band, Stone Sour—and he's doing a lot of growing up.
"I'm 36 now and I can't sing about teenage angst anymore," Taylor tells SPIN.com of Stone Sour's new album, Audio Secrecy. The record, the band's third, is a mature and intensely personal work for Taylor, who has gone through a divorce, gotten re-married, and lost his friend Gray, all in the past three years.
Taylor, a funny dude who occasionally refers to himself in the third person, chats with SPIN.com about Audio Secrecy, singing Motorhead while wearing Spider-Man pajamas, and treating his family to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory.
Why call your record Audio Secrecy?
I love when a phrase has a few different meanings, and I was trying to find play on words for "idiosyncrasy." Idiosyncrasies are those little things that differentiate us, that make us individuals. But at the same time they tie us together. I hit on "audio secrecy" and immediately realized that it can mean something completely different to people. It can mean something dark or practical, light or funny. After thinking about it for a while, I realized it's a descriptive way of talking about music. Consider classic songs like "Master of Puppets" by Metallica or "These Arms of Mine" by Otis Redding. They're drastically different songs, yet both epic songs. Why do they sound the way they do? Why do people gravitate towards them? To me it's about the undertones or the overtones, the details—the way it was recorded, the temperature in the room, the instruments they used, the performance, the mixing and the mastering. It all comes down to these little elements. That, to me, is audio secrecy. That's what makes one song killer and one song filler. What makes one song live forever and the other one delegated to a bargain bin.
I understand Audio Secrecy's album art is important to you...
We wanted to play with the idea of a secret society, like Skull and Bones or Illuminati, and tie in little clues or secret folds on the cover so it becomes something different all together. The way we looked at it was, "What if this is the last album to ever get released by a band? What would you want to do with it?" Because in this era of zip drives and memory sticks, there's no guarantee you'll be able to release another physical album. We really wanted to make a statement with it. I can remember waiting in line to buy Iron Maiden and Metallica tapes and I would study the liner notes. I would read the names of the people they thanked or the little anecdotes and just wonder what they were thinking when they added that. I want to keep that going. I refuse to think that the record industry is dead because I've signed enough copies of my albums to know that people still buy them.
When did the new songs come together?
Most started back on the Come Whatever May tour. But some songs go way back. We were originally entertaining the idea of releasing back-to-back albums because Come Whatever May sold so well. But at the time it just made more sense to do record another Slipknot album. So there was still a lot of material that was ready to go. Plus we were writing stuff right up until the moment that we went into the studio. So it's a combination of the old and the new, and everything blending together really well.
Stone Sour recorded with producer Nick Raskulinecz (Foo Fighters, Deftones). What do you like about working with him?
He's very much like me; he has a great mind for all kinds of music; he doesn't just cater to one style or one genre, or one type of production. He loves heavy music, slow music, acoustic music, and driving rock tunes. He just sees the entire spectrum and we try to embrace all those different types; we don't want to repeat ourselves. Working with him on this album was a no-brainer because we have so much different material and we needed someone who could pull back and look at it as a whole and go, "Okay, we're going to be able to make an incredible album with this." And it worked!
