Marilyn Manson

Marilyn Manson may shave his eyebrows, down Abinsthe, consume narcotics, sing about swastikas, and feign masturbation onstage, but on the phone, the man born Brian Warner is chattier than a seventh-grade girl -- dude talks and talks and talks and talks and talks and talks and talks... without pause. And it's all wildly entertaining -- and, at times, revolting.

While we dialed Manson to discuss The High End of Low, his reunion album with bassist Twiggy Ramirez, which debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 chart last month, the rocker's always got other things on his mind -- who are we to change the subject?

For nearly two hours, Manson touched on nearly every aspect of his life, from his $200,000 on-tour drug habit to being blamed for school shootings to the depression he suffered after splitting from his girlfriend, actress Evan Rachel Wood. He even crossed all lines of decency (as usual), revealing in a TMI moment that he'd been flinging semen-filled condoms at a wall right before our interview. Wholesome!

Manson moves fast and has lots to say, whether it's intelligent, disgusting, scary, insightful, ridiculous, unbelievable, or heartfelt -- so hang on tight.

Hey Marilyn. How are you doing?
It depends, are we going to make this a "shit on Manson" interview, or are we going to make it a good interview?

This is going to be the best interview ever.
Good.... I was going to email you a photograph I just took. It's of a new piece of modern art I created. Let's call this work my Jack-off Pollack, of sorts. I had two condoms -- alien things to me, I haven't seen them in 25 years -- and I threw them on the mirror, and they stuck, and they formed this piece of modern art. And I can't decide what to call it. I'm thinking about calling it "I Don't Want You to be Cursed With My Retarded Child," or "It's Not Just Love, It's a Lifestyle," because they were Lifestyle condoms.

Would the name be different if they were Magnum or Trojan condoms?
I suppose. I was just curious what I could do with a condom filled with my semen, other than the obvious damage that one could do.

Well, you know, you could be sanitary and throw it away?
It was like a piñata of disease and babies and confusion. It's literally just dripping down as we speak, two of them. I just wanted to make sure that you know that I can perform. I want to make sure that my sexual prowess is established here. I'd love this photo to be on the cover of SPIN.

What's up with your album's title, The High End of Low?
I went through a tough period over Christmas, during which I learned the difference between love and dependence, and the difference between weakness and desire. And it made a big difference in my life.

So I came back [to the studio] on January 2, and I saw my only friends, which at this point is the band, and everyone asked me, "How're you doing?" And I said, "Well, I'm at the high end of low." And automatically I knew that that's what the record was going to called.

Explain.
It really defines the record, which is about falling from grace and trying to fit in and be accepted as a mortal or as a normal person when people don't see you as that. It's also about giving up what you are to prove that you love somebody more than you love yourself. When you get to that point you're unlovable. And for me, halfway through the record, you can hear it. It went from despair to anger, it's like passing through the stages of destruction and reconstruction.

What was the recording process like? It's been over seven years since you and Twiggy worked together. Was that tough?
Well, it's the album that Twiggy and I always wanted to make. And unfortunately, or fortunately, it took us being apart to get to that place. He went and he did things on his own, and I did things on my own, and we both did things that we're proud of. He started with the music and I wrote the lyrics, and I was involved in production in a different sense. [Producer/ex-Nine Inch Nails drummer] Chris Vrenna played the role of the responsible person, although we tormented him plenty. I'm in a vocal booth, isolated, with my every breath and wheezing deviated septum and coughing and vomiting and ejaculating, whatever noises are coming out of me, I made [Vrenna] write down my lyrics. A lot of times, I went into songs with ideas only formed in the part of my head that I don't know how to operate, the subconscious.

But that doesn't mean I was improvising -- I don't even know what that means. I don't want people to ever get confused when someone says, "Oh the record sounds really raw, really unproduced." It was a clear choice in production style, and it doesn't mean that it was easy to record or produce; it means that you have to do things differently. I came off of Eat Me, Drink Me with this fantasy, a Shakespearean ideal of romance, you know, this "If the world doesn't understand us, then let's die together" thing. Which, now, I think is cowardice. And you hear that going into the first track. The songs appear on the album in the order in which I sang them. "Devour" was the first one -- and it was the hardest one to get too.

Why was that song so emotionally tough for you?
That song is about when someone said to me, "Okay, I want to be with you until I die." And then they gave up. I was at the point in my life where I was like, "Okay, let's die, but I tell you what, I'm going to kill you first, because I don't trust you." Honestly. It's hard to look back and see myself as the same person. I'm very objective now. I started to apply this really fantastic rule that they don't teach you in AA or AAA, or any other acronym: Do drugs and drink when you're happy, not when you're sad. It has a great effect. But I can't say that I did that the whole time.

When I was making Eat Me, Drink Me, I felt like the future version of me came back and saw the old version, and instead of killing the future version, the old version of me was buried with Eat Me, Drink Me. In some anomaly, if you want to look at it in a science fiction way, the Manson that exists now is not even the same person that had anything to do with the past 39 years of my life. The record, the 15th track, was finished on my birthday -- 1-5-69. The 15s are just overwhelming on the record. It's my number. It's the Devil card in the Tarot. I have it tattooed behind my ear. It's probably the new number of the beast.

You and Twiggy spent nearly a decade apart. How did you guys get back together?
It was completely fateful. I went down into the lobby of the hotel I was staying at -- much like right now I didn't have a place to stay. It was the Roosevelt Hotel, which many consider to be haunted. This was during a break on the Eat Me, Drink Me tour, right before Christmas 2007. We ran into each other completely by accident, and he looked like I felt a year before that. And I suddenly realized that he'd finally grown into that stage in your life where you take the risk of commitment and fear and loss, and that never existed before for either of us because we had each other.

We both got ourselves into a lot of relationships that were probably unfair because of our lack of one another -- we tried to have the girls in our lives fill a void that was missing in us as best friends. Looking back now I realize that played a big part. And him coming back into my life caused a great disruption in my past relationship, it just changed me in a way that initially was euphoric. I had no hesitation to tell Tim Skold, who had taken his place, "Look, this has to happen. I'm sorry, goodbye." So we just toured for about a month, and we wanted to keep going, so we started writing the record. First and foremost I'm married to what I do, every artist is. And I think that was something that didn't make sense in my past relationship. And I felt torn, like I was supposed to choose between the two. And I couldn't, it was hard. So I ended up just burning one to the ground and just trying to salvage the other one while it was happening.

It sounds like the period after you and Evan Rachel Wood broke up was really tough. What was your lowest point?