Slipknot’s Clown: Pandemic “Made Me Creative” on New Music
Slipknot percussionist M. Shawn “Clown” Crahan has granted an exclusive interview to his employee, Terry “Beez” Bezer, of Slipknot’s very own hard-hitting journalistic outpost Knotfest.com. And in that interview, amidst the usual gobbledy-gook of nonsensical Clownspeak, he has revealed that the pandemic ratcheted up his creativity, the result of which has been new music for Slipknot.
You could just take the easy route and digest my tl;dr version above, or you could attempt to parse through this nonsense, either way is fine, really:
“Nothing is ever done. Why? Because nothing is ever done until everyone in the band has had their say. I like to back that. If it hasn’t happened, no one grabbed me, I will fight for that. We merely do what we do in this life.
“Right now, the pandemic hit, and it made me creative. And if anybody’s mad at me for being creative, I don’t know what to say about it. But I know that we can use all of it, or none of it — I don’t care either way. So I will let you know, maybe we will use all of it or none of it — either way, we don’t need to make it confusing.
“But I will play it until Sid Wilson has said what he wants to say, listened to every ounce, been able to take his time. I point him out, because he has not been one of the people yet to be here; that’s gonna happen very soon, as I go into his location, and doing the same thing. I say him, because until he has heard everything, there could be a possibility, from A to Z, basically, to have his say and his due diligence to be 0, Slipknot’s guy, an O.G., Sid Wilson. I mean, come on. It’s never done. So it gets confusing.
“Maybe you get to talk to me, but you don’t get to talk to anyone else, so no one else gets to talk about it. So it gets confusing. So I wanna make it unconfusing.”
He continued:
“I got very creative. I created — how many [pieces of music]? I’m not gonna say. Because then the suits and all the stupid people, they wanna bug me. When I say ‘stupid people,’ I mean, they’re actually very smart. Then, next thing you know, I’m in a mouse trap and I don’t know what to do, and blah blah blah.
“But everybody just needs to know I’m in my basement, with my stuff, doing my thing, with my friends, the way we want to. There’s no one telling us anything.
“And Corey Taylor has gotten almost all of it and partaken on almost on all of it, which has made it a completely other sort of weird thing. But I’m going on record right now that we could be talking about one song.”
One song. Could be. OK, buddy!
This past November, Clown revealed that the band were working on new songs. Shortly thereafter, Corey Taylor said that “we’re thinking about kind of putting another album out maybe next year.” In December, drummer Jay Weinberg told an interviewer that he “can’t talk about” new music, which at least kinda suggests there’s new music about which to talk. Then, in March, Taylor echoed Weinberg, saying “I can’t say too much about it,” but referred to the new material as “conceptual.”
You can watch the recent interview with Clown below.
