MARILYN MANSON: 'I Learned The Difference Between Love And Dependence'

William Goodman of SPIN.com recently conducted an interview with Marilyn Manson. An excerpt from the chat follows below.

SPIN.com: What's up with your album's title, "The High End of Low"?

Manson: 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.

SPIN.com: Explain.

Manson: 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.

SPIN.com: What was the recording process like? It's been over seven years since you and Twiggy [Ramirez, bass] worked together. Was that tough?

Manson: 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.

Read the entire interview at SPIN.com.