KORN Frontman: 'I Look At My Body Of Work As A Diary'

Steve Baltin of AOL Music recently conducted an interview with KORN frontman Jonathan Davis. An excerpt from the chat follows:

AOL: Do you often go back and listen to your own stuff?

Davis: I did recently, just to pull out songs for this tour. And once I get a new album I listen to it, but I hear it so much in the studio I'm pretty much done with it. Every once in a while I'll pull out [the KORN catalog] and listen to it, but I don't really listen to it that much. It's this really cool body of work, all these eight albums.

AOL: Revisiting these songs, are there any that have really changed for you or any that have really surprised you?

Davis: Every one of them [laughs]. We're going to play "Ass Itch", a song off "Life Is Peachy" that we played 11 years ago, and I'm going, "God, this song is cool." So we put it in the set. Or a song that was off the first record that we haven't played in 10 years. And just going through and listening to these songs, there were so many, we can't fit them into our hour and a half time slot.

AOL: It's a body of work amassed over years, yet people change. Is there anything that surprises you about yourself at that time?

Davis: We lived everything that I was feeling when I did those songs. I look at my body of work as a diary. It was where I was at that period of time or what I was feeling. So it doesn't really surprise me where I was at, because it was all something that made it easy to come out, like a journal. I look back and I go, "I remember how I was feeling that song." So it's not something like, "I can't believe I wrote that or I was feeling that way," because it just brings back those memories.

AOL: It's got to be interesting to revisit those songs and see how much you've changed.

Davis: Definitely. I look back on that other stuff and see how much of a happier person I am now since I've had my kids and gotten sober and all that stuff. Back when I first started KORN, I was a depressed, suicidal f---, boy.

AOL: It's a cool way for you to realize how far you've come to get sober.

Davis: I'm living proof that you can go through that s--- and come out on top. And I think a lot of kids look at me that way. I get so many kids coming to me: "Thank you so much for helping me through this, or giving me an outlet to release these feelings." I feel like I'm one of those guys that made it; and if I can do it and maintain this and be a role model for people to see there is light at the end of the tunnel, then so be it. I get just a ridiculous amount of e-mails and letters from kids saying, "Thank you so much for saving my life." And it didn't start out that way. I was an alcoholic, drunk, speed freak, depressed f--- screaming my guts out 'cause I was mad at the world. [My motivation] was, for me, more selfish: It wasn't to help people, but it kind of turned into that, and that really made me feel good about myself.

Read the entire interview at this location.