Slipknot‘s Shawn ‘The Clown’ Crahan has revealed the band’s ambitious plans to record a double or concept album – and what their next world tour might entail.
The masked metal icons came off the road last year, and while frontman Corey Taylor recently said that the band currently “ain’t doin’ shit”, now Clown has said that the band have a wealth of material ready to work on.
“I will give you this – we have decided to do things differently,” Clown told NME. “Our label had been bought and sold, people who used to give me advice are gone now, we’re still standing. We’re not going to wait around for Corey Taylor to say that he’s ready, no one’s going to wait for me to finish directing a movie, the same thing goes if someone wants to go out on tour with someone else.
“Every three or four months we’ve been getting together and we’ve been writing for up to 30 days. Currently, we have about 27 pieces of work – about seven or eight are completed. They’re not completed songs, that’s far from the truth. That’s where people start fighting over Corey Taylor not being there or Jim wanting to do something else. We as artists have demanded that we get together every three or four months and blow our brains out with art. We’ve been trying to create as much art as possible.”
When asked about a potential time frame for working on the next album, Crahan replied: “For the three years we toured we were writing and recording the whole time. We’ll be getting together in September. Corey Taylor is doing his thing right now with Stone Sour, and when he’s done, he’ll need a little time off. He’s always done that. Then he’ll be right back in it, writing Slipknot songs and lyrics.
“A lot of us are meeting up in September to start working on those 27 pieces of music and we’re going to add to that. Our goal is to get to somewhere where it feels like we could have a double album. Whether or not we’ll get to that, I have no idea. It’s almost an impossible thing to arrive at because you have to have so much music and pick what’s right. But I would like to have a double album and I would like to have a concept album. I’ve been speaking to Corey and Jim and we’re not just going to ‘do it’, we’re not going to be contrived. It has to be right, it has to work for all of us.”
Crahan also said that he wants the next record to be their very best – as it has a very personal significance to him.
“The future is very exciting because it’s the sixth record,” he told NME. “The number ‘six’, besides being my personal number in Slipknot, is biblically, in computers, in maths, in whatever – the number six is a very important and structured number.”
The are also renowned for their volatile and adventurous live show. Once again, they have plans to not only step things up next time around, but also strip things back to the basics to get back in touch with their roots.
“It’s a beautiful thing to think ‘holy shit, we have six albums and we have to make a setlist’,” said Clown. We either have to go up in time, which is difficult because we like to just go for it and give everyone a bloody nose. It’s very unlikely that we’ll be doing a loner set, unless we do set changes, outfit changes, acoustic breaks – that’s something that we’ve been talking about too. We’ve also been talking about bringing it down to a small club tour.
“I’m not going to graduate this thing called rock n’ roll unless I can go back to where I started from – I want to get kicked in the balls by the audience. It’s not my fault if security have to work harder. Let the music compel the congregation. I want to go back there and have motherfuckers slap me in the face and have motherfuckers slap me in the face. I need to come back to that epiphany of where we began.”
Crahan also spoke to NME about the importance of speaking out about issues with mental health in the wake of the tragic loss of Chester Bennington and Chris Cornell.