“You can only write what you can write and each year brings a different set of circumstances to the table that result in different types of music, right? ‘Alien’ was that year and ‘The New Black’ is this year.”
That’s Strapping Young Lad mastermind Devin Townsend, responding to the question ‘Did you feel any pressure in producing a follow up to ‘Alien’?’ His stock answer is delivered politely and professionally, but there’s a hint of boredom and frustration detectable through the layers of telephone fuzz. Unexpectedly, and within the same breath, that hint suddenly becomes the basis of the entire interview. The gist of it being, Devin’s in a rut, and he wants out. Surprised? Well... yeah[$italics].
“At the end of the day, man, I’m just tired, and old, and bald, and fat, and grouchy, and bored. You know? So I was just like, I’m going to make this record, and do this stupid Ozzfest thing, and tell a bunch of stupid jokes in front of a lot of people at Download, then I’m just going to fuck off for a while.”
Needless to say, this isn’t the kind of talk you would expect from an artist with a new album to promote, supported by a series of high profile festival dates. What exactly is going on here? Does Devin intend to exit the music business entirely? Or just put Strapping Young Lad out to pasture?
“I’ll be doing other projects,’ he answers. “But SYL was never supposed to be the type of band that played at Download or Ozzfest. Here we are doing it and I’m just like, ‘WHAAAT?’ There’s a part of me that just wants to step away from it. The new album’s like, ‘Okay, well, we’re gonna be doing these big shows and doing the Ozzfest... alright, I’m going to write a sing-a-long record that essentially tells everybody that they’re idiots. Including myself.’ We’re all idiots, it’s all stupid. This record’s supposed to be a celebration of the idiocy that is this career.”
Devin Townsend has always approached the world of metal with a degree of laconic humour, but today he sounds exasperated. It seems the years of grinding through the music industry mill have taken their cumulative toll on our embattled protagonist.
“It’s been fifteen years of apathy and misanthropic views on life,” he explains. “The bigger this gets, the less I care, to the point where I just need to go spend some time with my family. I don’t wanna bastardise Strapping and all these other projects by doing it for the money. Strapping was about the big middle finger, and it still is, but I don’t think it needs to go any further than this. I’m always gonna be putting out music but I just need to put my guitar away for a while and step away from it. No matter how many people give you googly eyes while you’re on the stage, no matter how many people try and tell you that your band is really cool, or conversely, that your band sucks, at the end of the day it’s all a joke, and anybody who believes in it is just asking for trouble. I just don’t believe it. You know what I mean? Download? It was great! It was a lot of fun, right? ‘Feather in my hat, great, thank you very much...’ You can keep[$italics] it.
“I just don’t care[$italics],” he continues. “The record company are like, ‘Strapping’s on the rise! You guys have gotta sign for another fifteen records!’ And this started as a fuck you to everything! I don’t wanna be in a position where I’m like, ‘Fuck me[$italics]! Look at me! I’m a whore!’ You know?”
What might seem unnervingly close to self-sabotage is more likely indicative of Townsend’s keen instinct for self-preservation, and his unwillingness to become another dishonest shill pimping out a worn copy of his former self is actually pretty fucking admirable. He’s also refreshingly direct when called upon to survey the SYL ouevre.
“The best Strapping record was ‘City’,” he admits. “That’s not gonna change. I can do a hundred more Strapping records and I’m never gonna do ‘City’ again. A lot of people trumpet their new record as the best thing ever, but I did ‘City’ when I was 23 or 25, and at that point I truly felt it, I truly lived it, I truly believed it, as opposed to having to go there in order to have something to tour. That’s why I still feel like ‘The New Black’ is a valid piece of art, just because it’s like, ‘Alright, you want me to go there? Sing along! You’re an idiot! I’m an idiot! We’re all idiots!’”
While it might not scale the dizzy heights of SYL’s finest hour, ‘The New Black’ is an honest reflection of where Devin Townsend is at this moment in time. It’s a weird and bitter place, for sure, but don’t take Townsend’s current disdain for the rock ‘n’ roll circus as any indication that he’s lost the plot musically. “Artistically, it’s totally sound and I’m proud of it,” he states, and with good reason. The complex webs of cybernetic riffage that underpin songs like ‘Wrongside’, ‘Almost Again’ and the title track mean that ‘The New Black’ isn’t quite the dumbed-down, meatheaded metal album its chief architect might suggest.
However, were it not for the savage tech-metal fury with which it is delivered, some of the new material could be considered perilously close to the platitudinal. ‘You Suck’ and ‘Fucker’ are enjoyable slabs of rabble rousing mock-menace, but lyrically they’re entirely undemanding. Lest we forget, this is the guy who gave us such darkly confessional gems as ‘AAA’ and ‘Detox’. If Townsend is to be believed, he has written these specifically for rabid crowds to howl along to. Unfortunately, he also seems to have lost enthusiasm for touring, at least as far as SYL is concerned.
“It’s gotten to the point where it really interferes with my life,’ he explains. “Because not only don’t I care, now I have to not care for like, ten months of the year. Everybody’s got such a hard-on for touring, too. All these bands are like, ‘You know what I’d really like to do, man? I’d really like to get into a 40 foot steel tube, with fifteen men, drink beer and watch The Simpsons! For ten months! That would be great. Then for that one hour a day we’ll go up there and sweat, and pretend that it matters to our life personally that we can pretend that we’re rock stars.’ You know?”
Ironically, Devin’s lack of faith in the rock ‘n’ roll dream makes him a brilliantly entertaining frontman. His slyly sarcastic announcements at Download (“Down my fucking load, babies!”) punctured the pomposity of the event like a rain of tin tacks on an over-inflated balloon.
“You know what the best thing about Download was?” he laughs. “We watched the video after, and I blew a ball of snot out of my nose on the first song! It stuck to my cheek for the whole show. So I’m like, ‘Okay, here I am at the biggest show I’ll probably ever play, and I’ve got snot all over my face.’ I officially named the ball of snot ‘Herman’. You get to the point with your band after ten years where you’re finally able to play a show like that, and what do you see? You see this ugly, dirty, bald, old, fat, miserable fuck with snot on his face. There you go! Hahahahaha!”
According to Devin, he stumbled into his decade-plus career in heavy metal more or less an accident, and his subsequent inability to enjoy the superficial pleasures of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle means that he should get the fuck out. Right now.
“When I was a kid I was never like, ‘I’m gonna be a rock star! I’m gonna grow up and play my guitar in front of a whole bunch of people!’ I got out of school, I liked music, I was good at it, so I made a demo. The next thing I knew I was in LA. Here I am, fifteen years later, in an office in Germany, bitching and complaining about these great things that have happened. I’m just unappreciative, and therefore should not be allowed to do it.”
One thing that becomes abundantly clear from this conversation is that Townsend is thoroughly sick of seeing his own face plastered all over the music press. It’s perhaps easy to forget that Townsend is a musician - a highly talented one - first and foremost, and only grudgingly a ‘personality’.
“Believe it or not, I tend to be a rather private person. I don’t want people looking at me, I don’t want to be recognised, I don’t want to play the game, right? And because of downloading, you probably do the same amount of interviews and your face is in the same amount of magazines as maybe fifteen, twenty years ago, except you sell a tenth of the amount of records. So it’s like you get all the fame but none of the financial rewards, right? It’s like, if you really like fame, then again, I’m telling you man, this is the job for you. I have a baby, everybody knows about it. I fart sideways, everybody knows about it. I take pills for a very common mental ailment, everybody knows about it. For fuck’s sake, man! It’s impossible to kind of be alone and make music. If I could pay my rent by making music for me, my friends and a couple of people that I know here and there, man, I would do it.”
Although Devin has always been candid on the subject of his bipolar disorder both in his work and in interviews, he feels his reputation as the ‘mad scientist of metal’ has been blown out of all proportion. In essence, his attempts to demystify the condition have backfired.
“I’ve said this before,” he groans. “I’d say a good 60% of the English speaking world takes pills for some sort of thing, right? You can’t sleep, or you have crazy thoughts... we live in an industrial disease-ridden world, and you have to take steps in order to keep your equilibrium. But y’know, everybody’s so insistent on me being the ‘crazy guy’. I’ll take 50 photos at a photo shoot of me just looking normal. Then I’ll sneeze, and that one moment where my eyes are crossed and there’s spit coming out of my mouth and my teeth are all yellow, that’s when they’ll click the photo and they’ll put that on the interview and say, ‘He’s CRAZY!’ You know? The difference between now and fifteen years ago, is that would’ve sold you a lot more records then than it does now, because anybody who wants to hear Devin Townsend or Strapping Young Lad, or any band, they just have to punch it into the computer and there it is. You’ve got it for free. But that doesn’t change the amount of interviews and the amount of shows you have to do in order to get from point A to point B.”
So it’s maximum effort for minimum return?
“Yeah, but it’s not about the return,” flinches Devin. “The bottom line with my career is the art. Really. I love extreme art, I love extreme music for the sake of being able to convey extreme emotions, but... rock is stupid. I’m not a rock star, I never will be, but the whole facade and the whole image... it’s just stupid. Anybody who believes it is setting themselves up for a job in a pizza factory in ten years. We’re all the saaame[$italics]! Just because you’ve got fancy pants and sunglasses doesn’t make any difference when you’re crosslegged on the toilet, grunting out a curry shit at four o’ clock in the morning with your face pressed against the sink because you’re trying to find something cold to bring your temperature down. Everybody is an idiot, you know what I mean? I guess my problem with this whole rock ‘n’ roll thing is that they really try and convince whoever’s doing it that they’re not that person. That for some reason, you’re better, you’re more privileged, you’re smarter, you’re more gifted. So maybe if my career never does anything from here on out, the crowning moment of my entire career will be having a huge hunk of snot on my face at Download. ‘I’m an idiot! Thank you very much for coming! Buy a T-shirt!’”
So is this really the end of Strapping Young Lad? Does ‘The New Black’ represent the last gasp of a much loved metal institution? Or is this all some bizarre, elaborate promotional stunt? At the end of the conversation Townsend requests that we “take whatever I said with a grain of salt,” but the 34 year old Canadian sounds genuinely burnt out and pissed off. Only Devin knows what will happen next, and he may yet confound all our expectations. It wouldn’t be the first time.
That’s Strapping Young Lad mastermind Devin Townsend, responding to the question ‘Did you feel any pressure in producing a follow up to ‘Alien’?’ His stock answer is delivered politely and professionally, but there’s a hint of boredom and frustration detectable through the layers of telephone fuzz. Unexpectedly, and within the same breath, that hint suddenly becomes the basis of the entire interview. The gist of it being, Devin’s in a rut, and he wants out. Surprised? Well... yeah[$italics].
“At the end of the day, man, I’m just tired, and old, and bald, and fat, and grouchy, and bored. You know? So I was just like, I’m going to make this record, and do this stupid Ozzfest thing, and tell a bunch of stupid jokes in front of a lot of people at Download, then I’m just going to fuck off for a while.”
Needless to say, this isn’t the kind of talk you would expect from an artist with a new album to promote, supported by a series of high profile festival dates. What exactly is going on here? Does Devin intend to exit the music business entirely? Or just put Strapping Young Lad out to pasture?
“I’ll be doing other projects,’ he answers. “But SYL was never supposed to be the type of band that played at Download or Ozzfest. Here we are doing it and I’m just like, ‘WHAAAT?’ There’s a part of me that just wants to step away from it. The new album’s like, ‘Okay, well, we’re gonna be doing these big shows and doing the Ozzfest... alright, I’m going to write a sing-a-long record that essentially tells everybody that they’re idiots. Including myself.’ We’re all idiots, it’s all stupid. This record’s supposed to be a celebration of the idiocy that is this career.”
Devin Townsend has always approached the world of metal with a degree of laconic humour, but today he sounds exasperated. It seems the years of grinding through the music industry mill have taken their cumulative toll on our embattled protagonist.
“It’s been fifteen years of apathy and misanthropic views on life,” he explains. “The bigger this gets, the less I care, to the point where I just need to go spend some time with my family. I don’t wanna bastardise Strapping and all these other projects by doing it for the money. Strapping was about the big middle finger, and it still is, but I don’t think it needs to go any further than this. I’m always gonna be putting out music but I just need to put my guitar away for a while and step away from it. No matter how many people give you googly eyes while you’re on the stage, no matter how many people try and tell you that your band is really cool, or conversely, that your band sucks, at the end of the day it’s all a joke, and anybody who believes in it is just asking for trouble. I just don’t believe it. You know what I mean? Download? It was great! It was a lot of fun, right? ‘Feather in my hat, great, thank you very much...’ You can keep[$italics] it.
“I just don’t care[$italics],” he continues. “The record company are like, ‘Strapping’s on the rise! You guys have gotta sign for another fifteen records!’ And this started as a fuck you to everything! I don’t wanna be in a position where I’m like, ‘Fuck me[$italics]! Look at me! I’m a whore!’ You know?”
What might seem unnervingly close to self-sabotage is more likely indicative of Townsend’s keen instinct for self-preservation, and his unwillingness to become another dishonest shill pimping out a worn copy of his former self is actually pretty fucking admirable. He’s also refreshingly direct when called upon to survey the SYL ouevre.
“The best Strapping record was ‘City’,” he admits. “That’s not gonna change. I can do a hundred more Strapping records and I’m never gonna do ‘City’ again. A lot of people trumpet their new record as the best thing ever, but I did ‘City’ when I was 23 or 25, and at that point I truly felt it, I truly lived it, I truly believed it, as opposed to having to go there in order to have something to tour. That’s why I still feel like ‘The New Black’ is a valid piece of art, just because it’s like, ‘Alright, you want me to go there? Sing along! You’re an idiot! I’m an idiot! We’re all idiots!’”
While it might not scale the dizzy heights of SYL’s finest hour, ‘The New Black’ is an honest reflection of where Devin Townsend is at this moment in time. It’s a weird and bitter place, for sure, but don’t take Townsend’s current disdain for the rock ‘n’ roll circus as any indication that he’s lost the plot musically. “Artistically, it’s totally sound and I’m proud of it,” he states, and with good reason. The complex webs of cybernetic riffage that underpin songs like ‘Wrongside’, ‘Almost Again’ and the title track mean that ‘The New Black’ isn’t quite the dumbed-down, meatheaded metal album its chief architect might suggest.
However, were it not for the savage tech-metal fury with which it is delivered, some of the new material could be considered perilously close to the platitudinal. ‘You Suck’ and ‘Fucker’ are enjoyable slabs of rabble rousing mock-menace, but lyrically they’re entirely undemanding. Lest we forget, this is the guy who gave us such darkly confessional gems as ‘AAA’ and ‘Detox’. If Townsend is to be believed, he has written these specifically for rabid crowds to howl along to. Unfortunately, he also seems to have lost enthusiasm for touring, at least as far as SYL is concerned.
“It’s gotten to the point where it really interferes with my life,’ he explains. “Because not only don’t I care, now I have to not care for like, ten months of the year. Everybody’s got such a hard-on for touring, too. All these bands are like, ‘You know what I’d really like to do, man? I’d really like to get into a 40 foot steel tube, with fifteen men, drink beer and watch The Simpsons! For ten months! That would be great. Then for that one hour a day we’ll go up there and sweat, and pretend that it matters to our life personally that we can pretend that we’re rock stars.’ You know?”
Ironically, Devin’s lack of faith in the rock ‘n’ roll dream makes him a brilliantly entertaining frontman. His slyly sarcastic announcements at Download (“Down my fucking load, babies!”) punctured the pomposity of the event like a rain of tin tacks on an over-inflated balloon.
“You know what the best thing about Download was?” he laughs. “We watched the video after, and I blew a ball of snot out of my nose on the first song! It stuck to my cheek for the whole show. So I’m like, ‘Okay, here I am at the biggest show I’ll probably ever play, and I’ve got snot all over my face.’ I officially named the ball of snot ‘Herman’. You get to the point with your band after ten years where you’re finally able to play a show like that, and what do you see? You see this ugly, dirty, bald, old, fat, miserable fuck with snot on his face. There you go! Hahahahaha!”
According to Devin, he stumbled into his decade-plus career in heavy metal more or less an accident, and his subsequent inability to enjoy the superficial pleasures of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle means that he should get the fuck out. Right now.
“When I was a kid I was never like, ‘I’m gonna be a rock star! I’m gonna grow up and play my guitar in front of a whole bunch of people!’ I got out of school, I liked music, I was good at it, so I made a demo. The next thing I knew I was in LA. Here I am, fifteen years later, in an office in Germany, bitching and complaining about these great things that have happened. I’m just unappreciative, and therefore should not be allowed to do it.”
One thing that becomes abundantly clear from this conversation is that Townsend is thoroughly sick of seeing his own face plastered all over the music press. It’s perhaps easy to forget that Townsend is a musician - a highly talented one - first and foremost, and only grudgingly a ‘personality’.
“Believe it or not, I tend to be a rather private person. I don’t want people looking at me, I don’t want to be recognised, I don’t want to play the game, right? And because of downloading, you probably do the same amount of interviews and your face is in the same amount of magazines as maybe fifteen, twenty years ago, except you sell a tenth of the amount of records. So it’s like you get all the fame but none of the financial rewards, right? It’s like, if you really like fame, then again, I’m telling you man, this is the job for you. I have a baby, everybody knows about it. I fart sideways, everybody knows about it. I take pills for a very common mental ailment, everybody knows about it. For fuck’s sake, man! It’s impossible to kind of be alone and make music. If I could pay my rent by making music for me, my friends and a couple of people that I know here and there, man, I would do it.”
Although Devin has always been candid on the subject of his bipolar disorder both in his work and in interviews, he feels his reputation as the ‘mad scientist of metal’ has been blown out of all proportion. In essence, his attempts to demystify the condition have backfired.
“I’ve said this before,” he groans. “I’d say a good 60% of the English speaking world takes pills for some sort of thing, right? You can’t sleep, or you have crazy thoughts... we live in an industrial disease-ridden world, and you have to take steps in order to keep your equilibrium. But y’know, everybody’s so insistent on me being the ‘crazy guy’. I’ll take 50 photos at a photo shoot of me just looking normal. Then I’ll sneeze, and that one moment where my eyes are crossed and there’s spit coming out of my mouth and my teeth are all yellow, that’s when they’ll click the photo and they’ll put that on the interview and say, ‘He’s CRAZY!’ You know? The difference between now and fifteen years ago, is that would’ve sold you a lot more records then than it does now, because anybody who wants to hear Devin Townsend or Strapping Young Lad, or any band, they just have to punch it into the computer and there it is. You’ve got it for free. But that doesn’t change the amount of interviews and the amount of shows you have to do in order to get from point A to point B.”
So it’s maximum effort for minimum return?
“Yeah, but it’s not about the return,” flinches Devin. “The bottom line with my career is the art. Really. I love extreme art, I love extreme music for the sake of being able to convey extreme emotions, but... rock is stupid. I’m not a rock star, I never will be, but the whole facade and the whole image... it’s just stupid. Anybody who believes it is setting themselves up for a job in a pizza factory in ten years. We’re all the saaame[$italics]! Just because you’ve got fancy pants and sunglasses doesn’t make any difference when you’re crosslegged on the toilet, grunting out a curry shit at four o’ clock in the morning with your face pressed against the sink because you’re trying to find something cold to bring your temperature down. Everybody is an idiot, you know what I mean? I guess my problem with this whole rock ‘n’ roll thing is that they really try and convince whoever’s doing it that they’re not that person. That for some reason, you’re better, you’re more privileged, you’re smarter, you’re more gifted. So maybe if my career never does anything from here on out, the crowning moment of my entire career will be having a huge hunk of snot on my face at Download. ‘I’m an idiot! Thank you very much for coming! Buy a T-shirt!’”
So is this really the end of Strapping Young Lad? Does ‘The New Black’ represent the last gasp of a much loved metal institution? Or is this all some bizarre, elaborate promotional stunt? At the end of the conversation Townsend requests that we “take whatever I said with a grain of salt,” but the 34 year old Canadian sounds genuinely burnt out and pissed off. Only Devin knows what will happen next, and he may yet confound all our expectations. It wouldn’t be the first time.
