MANSON: 'I'm Comfortable With Being As Crazy Or Out Of Control As Anyone Likes To Think I Am'

Andrew Williams of Metro.co.uk recently conducted an interview with Marilyn Manson. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Metro.co.uk: What inspired your new album?

Manson: It was made at a turning point in my life. I was expected to change a lot of things about myself in my marriage and started thinking that things that made me who I am were faults. I started to separate myself from what I do but I've always believed an artist isn't as important as what they create. The album started as one song called "Just A Car Crash Away" and from it I ended up wanting to make music again and not wanting to give up on life. This is about accepting a romance was gone – not mourning over it — and also seducing a new romance to exist.

Metro.co.uk: Did you have an identity crisis?

Manson: I'm making a film based on the life story of Lewis Carroll and I identified with him so much because I wanted to write a story about a fractured personality like "Jekyll and Hyde" which is what I think "Alice In Wonderland" is about — it's about someone not knowing who they are or who they're supposed to be. It was that and cannibalistic, vampiric ideas that exist in all fiction and religion – if you have nothing to live for you have a different outlook on death. I don't want to die now whereas I had no desire to live before. For me romance has to be fearless and reckless and like "Bonnie And Clyde" or "True Romance" — I had to accept things about my personality that seemed too obvious before. I'm obviously a night-time person, someone on the verge of caricature, which I always avoided before. After I felt like I was on my way to make music again I felt more challenged to take on what could be considered clichéd concepts and re-do them. A lot of the themes on the record are classic staples of what great music has been made of but I thought it was time to give my take on them.

Metro.co.uk: Was being considered a caricature something that bothered you?

Manson: It was the fuel for a lot of my inspiration for making music. I felt the need to show myself as an artist by saying they were wrong in the way they perceived me and felt obliged to explain myself rather than be myself. I think my music became an armor as opposed to saying what I feel, in the way you'd say it in a diary. Now I'm not concerned with explaining myself at all. It's liberating in that this record was the last phone call before the electric chair situation you'd see in a movie. It was that dramatic moment. I wrote the song to see if it would get a response from one person and if it felt like I could create an emotion to feel like I had a reason to live. It saved me in that sense. I don't mind if it sounds dramatic because I know it's true.

Metro.co.uk: Were you planning on not going back to music?

Manson: I was convincing myself I didn't want to do music — I started to associate it with something that was unfulfilling. It came with the territory of my marriage in which I was expected to fix things about myself that I didn't realise the other person considered faults. I didn't know who I was supposed to be. Ultimately I realised I wanted to make a record that I could listen to that would make me feel a certain way. I've never listened to my music before because it was such a long process to make it, it seemed unnecessary.

Metro.co.uk: Why did you do such an explicit video with your new girlfriend?

Manson: I'm comfortable with being as crazy or out of control as anyone likes to think I am because it suits me well. With meeting Evan Rachel Wood, who is my girlfriend now, we wouldn't have been expected to have anything in common until we just became friends. I realised that besides the fact I'm clearly the immature one in the relationship, she's a twin in a lot of ways and her personality reflects a lot of things I felt I wasn't supposed to be. It was at that point I realised all hope wasn't gone. I was fortunate enough to realise this without a moment of clarity that involved religion or sobriety or flowers and puppy dogs. It was bringing hellfire and the devil back into my life — how it was meant to be — that reminded me I'm perfectly capable of existing in a hell of my own making.

Read the entire interview at Metro.co.uk.