STONE SOUR Frontman: 'Audio Secrecy' Is 'A Very Honest Album For Me'

Spin.com recently conducted an interview with STONE SOUR/SLIPKNOT frontman Corey Taylor. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Spin.com: Why call your record "Audio Secrecy"?
Taylor: I love when a phrase has a few different meanings, and I was trying to find play on words for "idiosyncrasy." Idiosyncrasies are those little things that differentiate us, that make us individuals. But at the same time they tie us together. I hit on "audio secrecy" and immediately realized that it can mean something completely different to people. It can mean something dark or practical, light or funny. After thinking about it for a while, I realized it's a descriptive way of talking about music. Consider classic songs like "Master of Puppets" by METALLICA or "These Arms of Mine" by OTIS REDDING. They're drastically different songs, yet both epic songs. Why do they sound the way they do? Why do people gravitate towards them? To me it's about the undertones or the overtones, the details — the way it was recorded, the temperature in the room, the instruments they used, the performance, the mixing and the mastering. It all comes down to these little elements. That, to me, is audio secrecy. That's what makes one song killer and one song filler. What makes one song live forever and the other one delegated to a bargain bin.

Spin.com: STONE SOUR recorded with producer Nick Raskulinecz (FOO FIGHTERS, DEFTONES). What do you like about working with him?

Taylor: He's very much like me; he has a great mind for all kinds of music; he doesn't just cater to one style or one genre, or one type of production. He loves heavy music, slow music, acoustic music, and driving rock tunes. He just sees the entire spectrum and we try to embrace all those different types; we don't want to repeat ourselves. Working with him on this album was a no-brainer because we have so much different material and we needed someone who could pull back and look at it as a whole and go, "Okay, we're going to be able to make an incredible album with this." And it worked!

Spin.com: With its lyrics about heartbreak and other struggles, Audio Secrecy seems deeply personal.

Taylor: It's a very honest album for me. For the longest time I felt compelled to talk about how angry I was about certain things. But I can't be that guy. It made sense 10 years ago because it still was very fresh. But now I'm singing about the things that I've gone through in the last five years — the different relationships I've been in, the end of my first marriage, my new marriage. Also, it's not just romantic relationships, but relationships with friends that I've seen change for the worse over the years, and how you try to close that gap but you can't relate to them anymore. These are people that you grew up with, people that you've known half your life, and to see how they're becoming less and less recognizable. It's very much about how long it's taken to wash the dirt off my hands.

Read the entire interview from Spin.com.