Corey Taylor Throws Shade About Being Held Back in Stone Sour
In a bout of egotism that surprises exactly no one, Corey Taylor opened up in an interview with Grammy.com about his need to do his own thing after being held back in previous projects.
“As a performer, you physically want to rise to that occasion,” he explains. The only thing that holds us back in performance is age, and I’m lucky that I’m healthy enough that I can still go at a certain level. But I know I can’t continue that forever. The guys in Slipknot also know that, and that’s something that we’re talking about very honestly. ‘What do we do?’ ‘What does the next level of Slipknot look like?’
“We’re looking at it from an artistic point of view. How do we make it still seem frenetic and off the chain, but also something that we can deal with from a strength point of view? It’ll be interesting to see where that challenge takes us. It also allows me to be able to do stuff like this solo thing. It’s high-energy right now, but when it gets to the point where I want to tame it down a little bit, I have songs that I can lean into and let them do the heavy lifting for me.
“This is probably the closest to the real me as a performer that I’ve been in my whole career. Because obviously, with Slipknot, it’s really one side of the genre. With Stone Sour, I was being held back because of certain people in the band. But with this, there are no limitations, and I can do music carte blanche as far as genre goes and performance goes. I have a band that can play anything, which is just criminal. It’s really, really cool. I’m just really fortunate to be in the place where I am right now.”
While he doesn’t go so far as to tell us who those certain people are, this isn’t the first time he’s put Stone Sour on blast in a similar way. In an interview with Paste about putting Stone Sour on hiatus to do solo music, he claimed:
“When Stone Sour first started, not only was I playing guitar constantly, but I was also the lead guitarist and main writer. Honestly, one of the reasons why I was very adamant about starting my solo thing is that there was a weird misconception around who was writing what for what band. Maybe this is where my ego comes into play, but I felt like I wasn’t getting the credit for the things I was actually writing.
“With Stone Sour, it was fairly obvious, but there were a lot of songs that I wrote that people thought [guitarists] Jim [Root] or Josh [Rand] wrote where that wasn’t the case at all. And then, with Slipknot, there was a lot of stuff that either wouldn’t have been written without me, or that I wrote that other people gave [themselves] credit [for]. As someone who takes great pride in sitting down and creating something from nothing—just from my imagination—that stuck in my craw.”
We aren’t disagreeing about the ego comment, but we do have to admit, Taylor has a certain magnetism and swagger that he brings to all his projects—for better or for worse.
