Slipknot / Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor has given fans an update on his solo album.
Speaking with Terry “Beez” Bezer on the Knotfest.com podcast “Mosh Talks with Beez,” Taylor revealed that he has been in the studio recording music for the project while Slipknot were sidelined by the pandemic:
“It was something I was planning to do anyway next year when I got off the road with Slipknot, and, obviously, best-laid plans [were] just done and done. But I figured if this was the time to do it, why not try and do it. Me and my band quarantined. We social distanced for about two weeks, including our producer, Jay Ruston, who I worked with, and the people at the studio that I recorded at, which was Kevin Churko’s Hideout [Recording Studio in Las Vegas].”
While some of the songs on this album were the result of recent writing sessions, there are some that have been in the works for decades, including one that he started in high school. He continued,
“This was stuff that we had been working on for a while. This was stuff that I had written as [recently] as the last Slipknot tour and as far back as… There’s a song on here that dates back to when I was in high school, so that tells you how long I’ve been sitting on a lot of this material. And it’s just stuff that I’ve kind of had floating around that didn’t really fit with either band. It just had different energy and a different vibe.”
Taylor says there will be 13 songs on the finalized album. He elaborates,
“We did thirteen originals. We recorded seven covers, and then we did six acoustic versions of the originals that we put together. Or [maybe] it’s five. I can never keep that straight. Maybe it’s six [covers] and six [acoustic versions] — I can’t remember. All I know is that we did an insane amount of work in two and a half weeks — something that we thought was gonna take two months — and we destroyed it. We were doing a song a day. And we got done, and we were, like, ‘Eh, okay. What are we gonna do now?’ Everything has come together so quickly that it’s crazy.”
Fans can expect an eclectic album with songs inspired by a variety of genres. Said Taylor,
“It’s everything I wanted it to be. There’s some Slade in there, there’s some Johnny Cash, there’s some Alice In Chains. I mean, big choruses, fun rock, just huge solos — huge solos. It’s incredible. I, actually, two years ago, started teaching myself piano just so I can record this song that I wrote for my wife, and I was able to play it and record it. And it’s really good — it’s probably one of the best things I’ve ever written.”
He continued later on,
“The way I’ve been looking at it is it’s like a futuristic throwback. Everything on this album is a hybrid of all these different genres that I’m really into. It’s a modern take on vibes that people have heard before, and yet I’ve taken them and kind of thrown them through this crazy filter to see what we get. Everybody who hears it is just blown away, so I’m really, really stoked.”
Fans can expect not one but two songs to be released prior to the album. Taylor told Beez of the songs, “There’s one that is the overall crusher single — really great, huge chorus, big vibe. And then there’s another one that is just as fun on the completely other end of the spectrum that people are gonna hear and they are going to lose their minds.”
Taylor has been talking publicly about a solo album since at least 2019. Back in November, he told Whatculture that he had “at least 26 songs written” for the project.
Slipknot released their latest album, We Are Not Your Kind, in August 2019. The band were slated to head out on summer tours in the US and UK, as well as their Knotfest At Sea cruise, however all of these dates had to be cancelled due to the pandemic.
