MARILYN MANSON: 'I've Got Nothing To Lose Now'

Nicole Powers of SuicideGirls.com recently conducted an interview with Marilyn Manson. An excerpt from the chat follows below.

SuicideGirls.com: I've been reading in interviews that this is a more autobiographical album. Did that make it harder to write?

Manson: Well, it was very difficult getting to the process of writing. Twiggy [Ramirez, bass] and I getting back together was probably more dramatic than we even realized... Because we were best friends, brothers, we lived together. I've never lived alone. I went from living at home to going on tour and hotels and rats and crack and Twiggy and New Orleans, and then a series of unmentionable, nefarious women people. And I think that there was an enormous void in both of our lives.

It wasn't even really a fight that we got into, it was something very silly, and one of us probably expected the other to call the next day to resolve it. But I think everything happens for a reason...We ran into each other at a hotel completely randomly and I could see in his face that he looked like I felt a year before that.

The last record, "Eat Me, Drink Me", was very much about a broken person. In fact it's not that I don't like it, or it makes me sad to listen to, but it's a record that we're probably not going to play anything off of. We might play "If I Was Your Vampire" because I think it's the record that's the most confident on the album, even though it's first [on the CD], because it was written last.

The difference between that and the new album, besides all of the personal things, [on] the new album, the songs appear in the order they were written. I don't know how that compares the two because there's a lot of differences, obviously, starting with Twiggy and I [being] back together.

He did things that were great, I think. He learned to be this musician. I mean he's always been a guitar player but no one's ever seen him as a guitar player because he's always played bass [live]. No one realizes that he wrote the guitar riff for "Beautiful People" or "Dope Show".

But anyway, he was just playing this music that was eventually intimidating to me because he had become a different type of musician while away from me. As a guitar player I felt, why wasn't he always the guitar player? What were we thinking? And, for me, I think there's nobody that plays bass better than him. His bass guitar sounds like he's playing it with his dick. It's the best bass that I could ever imagine. No one else can have that sound.

He just shines as a guitar player, and it took me a long time to get to the singing part. I had a bit of a disintegration, one world ended and another sort of began. It was probably inserting Twiggy into a situation where I had built a lifestyle now that was very isolated, very dependent on another person.

It wasn't the same way that I look at relationships now. There's big difference between weakness and desire, between love and dependence...The person that I really needed in my life, and I think that it threw some kind of disastrous monkey wrench in, but if I was actually given the choice to pick, which I should never have to pick, I wouldn't know what to say — it's an unfair thing to say. But the first and foremost thing that stood out to me that was important in my life was that I saw my friend that I hadn't seen in seven years and he needed me. It didn't matter about the music, he needed me, and I wish that I had had him when I felt that way, when my life was falling apart and I got divorced, and all that garbage happened. I was just glad to be there for him because he's like a little brother to me, and I finally got to the point of making the first song.

SuicideGirls.com: You talk about Twiggy being like a brother. You often hurt the people closest to you. That's what families do, they argue and then they come back together.

Manson: Well, you're right about that. The other part of it is, and this was advice that I got from one of my idols, Alejandro Jodorowsky, a director who had great influence on me. He said to me, because he's always read my tarot, and I mistook what he said...I even quoted it a lot of times in interviews, because he read my tarot and he said, "This year you will come together with your twin." I mistook that for the wrong relationship because at the end of the year there was Twiggy. That was what he meant. He even told me that when I saw him again after that. It was my foolishness and my projection, what I wanted to see, and Twiggy is that.

But you can have both. I can be married to my art but you can love more than one thing, and there's different types of love. It takes finding the right person that is able to make you stop thinking about your work, if you want to even use that word. Because it's hard when you're an artist; When does it turn off? Who knows? But it should turn of when you're with the person that you're romantically involved with. That's the point that I'm trying to be at now in my life. And that's a different point that I've never been at.

And it took me living alone, because I'd never lived alone. From November to January 5th is when I sang and wrote the lyrics. And that signifies something that the record's actually about. It's about that experience for me. It's not about any one particular thing, but it's about loss, it's about understanding loss.

When someone doesn't appreciate the concept of...If you call someone and say, "I need you," and they say, "Well I'll be there when I can," that's someone who doesn't understand loss. Because "when you can" — that might not happen 15 minutes later, and the only way you learn that, the way I learnt it, is when someone dies, or you lose something, you lose your money, you lose everything.

I've got nothing to lose now so in one way I have nothing to be afraid of, and that makes me feel really dangerous. And in another way that makes me value the things that I do have more than anything, and I'll fight and kill for them with no hesitation. The only thing that stops me from that is that I don't want to go to jail because it would prevent me from being what I want to be, and I don't want to be ass-raped on a daily basis. It's really that simple.

Read the entire interview at SuicideGirls.com.