COREY TAYLOR: 'In The 10 Years I've Been In SLIPKNOT, I've Written Four Riffs'

Mandy Feingold of FMQB recently conducted an interview with SLIPKNOT/STONE SOUR frontman Corey Taylor. An excerpt from the chat follows:

FMQB: This new STONE SOUR record is even more of a departure from your identity with SLIPKNOT than the first record. Is it important for you to keep those two musical identities separate?

Corey: "It is, but it isn't. The reason the album sounds the way it does is because it's actually closer to old-school STONE SOUR than it is anything else. I think when we did the first STONE SOUR album we were just throwing everything together to see what would happen. With this album, we knew we had an audience, and we knew people had really dug the stuff that we put on the first album. So we were like, 'Let's get back to basics. Let's get back to the thought process of, if we write something and we dig it, no matter how diverse it is, we'll put it out.' That's how the album came together, and that's really what this band is about."

FMQB: What do you get out of doing STONE SOUR that you don't get from SLIPKNOT?

Corey: "Everything else, let's put it that way. SLIPKNOT is still very grounded in the metal genre. It's very dark. And that's one side of my personality and one side of the things I like to do. STONE SOUR kind of allows me to do everything else, and that's what's so great about it. I know it's definitely why we put it back together, and I think it's why we have such a blast doing it."

FMQB: Do you think the bands have two different fan bases?

Corey: "I do. I think there are actually three different groups of people. There are people that love SLIPKNOT and don't really care about STONE SOUR. There are people in the middle that like both. And then there are people who really dig STONE SOUR and really don't care about SLIPKNOT. So I've got the best of everything right now. I'm actually in a really good spot. We've got a lot of fans that have made a decision, and that's the thing you want at the end of the day. You want people to either love it or hate it, but not to dismiss it."

FMQB: When you write a song, how do you know if it's for STONE SOUR or SLIPKNOT?

Corey: "When I write the music it's pretty much a guaranteed STONE SOUR song, because that's more the style that I write in. With SLIPKNOT, everybody in the band is so good technically in that genre that I just kind of sit back and go, 'You know what, I'll handle the lyrics, it's all good.' I think in the 10 years I've been in SLIPKNOT, I've written four riffs. But with STONE SOUR, it's much more of a hard rock deal. Even the heavier stuff — it's more fluid. That's where my musical style fits in. So when I write something with a guitar, I pretty much know it's a STONE SOUR song right out of the gate. Lyrically, it's a little different. I tend to let the music dictate where I'm going lyrically, so if a song is not my music, then it can go either way. When Paul [Gray] and Joey [Jordison] bring me stuff, obviously it's going to be a SLIPKNOT song. When Jim [Root] and Josh [Rand] bring me something, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a STONE SOUR thing. But when I'm just sitting around writing lyrics that I really don't have anything for, you never know. I may hear something that Paul and Joey have written, and I go, 'You know what, I wrote something about a year ago that could fit with that.' So it's really a crapshoot."

Read the entire interview at www.fmqb.com.