MARILYN MANSON: 'I Wasn't Sure If I Believed In Myself Anymore'

Ultimate-Guitar.com recently conducted an interview with Marilyn Manson. An excerpt from the chat follows:

Ultimate-Guitar.com: You recently got back from a successful European tour, how was it?

Manson: It was pretty phenomenal. I am really happy to be back into performing again after making this record, a record that I didn't know whether I wanted to make. But of course after I made it, I was very happy with it and to perform it on this tour, I'm feeling more excited, energized and inspired I think than I can remember. So I'm in a really good spot and am ready to start the American tour and ready to kick ass.

Ultimate-Guitar.com: Did you find that making "Eat Me, Drink Me" proved to be some sort of therapy for you?

Manson: I don't think it was really that simple, but looking back it's hard to really relate to how I was before I started making the record. And in making the record I think it's probably the best description of how I really felt. Because for the first time, I let my guard down and I wrote exactly at the moment of how I was feeling on pretty much every song. I suppose ultimately it was a salvation of some sorts because if I didn't make the record, we wouldn't be talking right now. I'm pretty convinced of that. I know it's pretty clichéd to say I know the record really changed me and it was cathartic because it was a little bit. But it's less easy to explain than just that. I think I was really confused as I wasn't sure if I believed in myself anymore. But it just took a simple step of starting with one song — "Just A Car Crash Away" — the first song I really sang on the album where I sang it through once, then once more recorded it. And that song became the first thing I did after a couple years of not wanting to do music. I played it to a few people later that same night because I just did it that one time and one person cried. So I realized that if I could make somebody feel something then that made me feel something to because I couldn't feel anything. And it made me realize I had to change.

Ultimate-Guitar.com: In what ways then did it effect a change in you?

Manson: Well, not so much in the obvious; the one-dimensional idea of myself, but in the way that I realized I had to change my surroundings and had to separate myself from everything. So then I could really focused on what would end up being the first real collaboration musically with Tim Skold. It was the first time the guitar player was actually playing almost a score to my life. He was playing exactly what I needed to hear and I didn't have to tell him what to play. And I wasn't accustomed to that because I'd always had a little bit more of a problem in steering people in a certain direction that I would want to go. So Tim and I fed off each other and it became the first real collaboration in my career and my life and that translated into my personal life too. I started realizing I had forced my perception of other people's feelings onto them. I had assumed or rejected the idea in the way I looked at life and romance, the idea that so many people ruin tomorrow by worrying about it today. I think you need to really have a kind of fearlessness. You need to be willing to drive off a cliff and when you have that fearlessness then you'll realize you don't have to that, which is the good part. And this helps make a change come about and that is the explanation for the difference in the musical approach to this record. I think it sounds more organic for the simple reason it was the way that I felt and it was the way I was making Tim feel because we were really close as he was the only person I saw on a daily basis last year.

Read the entire interview at Ultimate-Guitar.com.