Corey Taylor Explains Why He Stepped Away from Stone Sour
Corey Taylor, The Only Reason Worth Living on This Good Green Earth, has elaborated on the decision to place Stone Sour on “indefinite hiatus.”
A quick catch up: Stone Sour’s last album, Hydrograd, came out in 2017, followed by the requisite period of touring. Then Slipknot got busy, then Taylor launched his solo career, and then last summer he said this:
“I feel like Stone Sour has kinda run its course for now. We all talked as a band and decided to kinda put Stone Sour in indefinite hiatus. That’s the way it is. We’ve put it on the shelf for now. Everybody is kinda going and doing their own thing. Slipknot obviously is always gonna be the big dog, which is fine. Once everything kinda comes back to life, I’ll be wrapping that up tour-wise, but then after that I’m definitely hitting the road with the solo band to take this around the world and really show the world that other side of me.”
Stone Sour has always been an on-again-off-again endeavor so this news shouldn’t surprise fans, nor should we be surprised when the band eventually roars back to life. Corey said as much in a new chat with Los Angeles radio station 95.5 KLOS, and he also elaborated on what led to the hiatus, citing personal issues, the aforementioned work schedule, and his own creative drive:
“There was kind of a plateau with Stone Sour, creatively, that I needed to kind of step away from. For some reason, it didn’t feel the way that it felt in the past. And also, I was still dealing with my own issues coming out of my last marriage, and dealing with the depression that had come with that, and the bile of the toxic relationship…
“So going into Slipknot helped with that, it helped me release a lot of that, but then coming out of that, I knew that if I was going to be able to heal a little faster, I needed to do something that felt fresher. So the solo thing was definitely what I needed to do. And obviously, I’m going to stay doing solo stuff for a little longer.
“But you never say never. Stone Sour has been a part of my life since I was 19 years old, it predates Slipknot by five years, and it was the first real band that I ever started. So it will always be there for me, and hopefully, the other guys in the band feel that way. But for right now, I just need to be able to do this, and it’s just a part of me.”
In a separate interview in September of last year, Corey elaborated on the creative differences within both Stone Sour and Slipknot while throwing a bit of shade without mentioning either band by name. Speaking about making his solo album, he said:
“I can sum it up like this. It was the first time in years that I was surrounded by people, every one of those people were just as hungry as I was again. Does that make sense?
“That’s me being very diplomatic, that’s me not trying to throw any of my brothers under the bus, but it’s the first time in a long time that I was surrounded by people who wanted to make music for the same reason that I did, and that was just to make incredible music, being excited about the opportunity to make something massive.
“Being so fucking energized and stoked that you can feel it in a recording, you can hear it in the music, you can see it when we’re playing it.
“It’s been a long, long, long time since I was surrounded by people who were just as geeked to make music, fuck selling it, fuck playing it, fuck any of that, making music because it gives us so much joy. I haven’t felt that in a very, very long time.
“So that’s what I meant. I don’t give a shit about any of that stuff man, I make music for me first, then I share it with people. If I’m not into it, I don’t put it out there. I never will.
“That’s the only reason to do it righteously; if I happen to make money, that’s awesome too. I can pay my bills, take care of my people, but I don’t have a Lamborghini, I don’t have a solid-gold toilet, I don’t give a shit about any of that stuff.
“The only thing that matters to me is making music that I want to fucking hear back. I can’t say that about a lot of the people that I’m in a band with. Either band. But I can say that about this band. There it is.”
You can check out the most recent chat with 955 KLOS below.
[via Ultimate Guitar]
