ISSUE 11
11/8/06
9:22 pm
Page 068
stone live sour www.friendsoflive.com “They called us a dead generation, they told us that we wouldn’t survive, they left us alone in the maelstrom, as you can see we’re all clearly alive!” sings Corey Taylor on Stone Sour’s recent single 30-30/150... The song is the first single off of Come What(ever) May, the band’s follow-up album to their 2002 self-titled debut - and it fucking rocks. 30-30/150, much like the entire album, adheres to the single most important identifier of good music: it grabs you by the short and curlies, and keeps you cemented to the edge of your seat, right from the second it kicks in up until the moment the speakers finally fall silent. When Stone Sour released their platinumselling eponymous album in August 2002, the focus was not on the quality of the songwriting or the unique sound the band had created, but on the members; singer Corey Taylor and guitarist Jim Root were best known for their work with metal pioneers Slipknot, and many ignored the fact that Stone Sour had in fact existed since 1992 and was very much the main project for Corey up until he was asked to join Slipknot in 1997 (ironically after Slipknot beat Stone Sour in a local Battle Of The Bands competition), “I was already a fan of the band,” Corey Taylor recalls. Corey and Stone Sour are currently on their tour bus, racing down a motorway through France towards their next show, and the cellular phone reception is weak so Corey’s voice is coming down the phone-line intermittent and distorted. “I’d seen them live and I remember just wanting to be the singer of that fuckin’ band!” He laughs. “When they asked me try out, I thought I’d check it out. I was completely into it, and was totally different from anything I’d done. Leaving Stone Sour was the hardest decision I have ever made.” When Slipknot first crawled out of Des Moines, Iowa in late 1997, the world took a deep breath - and has been holding it since. Here was a band of 9 musicians, identifying themselves with the numbers 0 through 8,
that Stone Sour is more than just a side band. “Even when we were doing Slipknot, me and the guys would get together and record shit,” Corey reveals. “When it came to the point after the Iowa recording and tour cycle, I needed to do something completely different - and Stone Sour was right there.” The runaway global success of Slipknot must have played a part in the release of the Stone Sour album? “In a lot of ways, I think it actually hindered Stone Sour,” Corey muses. His voice is wearily contemplative and has a clear air of intelligence. “Think about Slipknot. Think about what people know about Slipknot. Here comes this band with Jim and Corey, and already on that, there are preconceptions forming about whether people will either instantly embrace or deny it, just through judging us on Slipknot. It was an uphill battle: we toured incessantly, we did every radio show, every interview we could just to get the name ‘Stone Sour’ out there, and try to get people to realise it was completely different. Making people see that they couldn’t go by their expectations was a lot of work, and now that hard work is starting to pay off. Of course, we have a lot of Slipknot fans that don’t care about Stone Sour, and a lot of Stone Sour fans that don’t care about Slipknot - and that’s a great place to be.” Three singles were released off of their first album, each one fostering more success for the band; Bother (which featured on the Spiderman OST) reached Number 2 in the US Mainstream Rock Charts, and rocketed the band into their own realm of fame. “Fame is just like the natural gas after you’ve mined all the oil,” Corey reasons. “It’s just an after-thought. It is what it is. I don’t let fame affect the way I write songs, because if you do, you end up turning into a band that’s quite crap.” And rightly so - there have been far too many bands in recent years writing songs almost directly targeting them at the mainstream. “Well, that’s the credo of the band: if we write it and we feel it,” Corey continues, “then let’s put it out there. Why hold back just
“FAME IS JUST LIKE THE NATURAL GAS
AFTER YOU’VE MINED ALL THE OIL,” COREY REASONS.
“IT’S JUST AN...ITAFTER-THOUGHT . IS WHAT IT IS. sporting gruesome masks and uniformlycoloured boiler-suits, and playing a notoriously intense form of heavy metal - people either loved them or hated them. Over the better part of the last decade, Slipknot has become almost a brand-name in metal; eleventeen-year old ‘mini-moshers’ can be seen in any town or city garbed in over-sized Slipknot hoodies, congregating in and around record stores. With the momentum and popularity of a multiplatinum selling metal band behind them, Slipknot’s #8 (Corey Taylor) and #4 (guitarist Jim Root) unmasked and announced the release of Stone Sour’s first album in 2002 - for the most part, people believed that Stone Sour was more of a one-off side project than a band to be taken seriously. The release of critically acclaimed Come What(ever) May has signalled 068
because you’re worried that people might think it’s too different? Fuck that! Band’s never used to be like that - they used to be like, ‘Okay, we wrote this, let’s see if there’s a couple of ears out there that dig it.’ With Stone Sour, we’ve always tried to cover the middle ground that so many bands have left open.” And, following that dogma, Stone Sour have gone above and beyond with the songs on Come What(ever) May - the songs range from all-out mosh anthems such as 30-30/150 and Socio to acoustic, soulful ballads such as Through Glass and ZZYXZ Rd. The band had toyed with similar musical fusion on their debut, but the degree to which they suceed on Come What(ever) May is phenomenal. “Putting Through Glass next to 30-30/150 is like putting Bother next to Get Inside - they may w w w. b u r n m a g . c o . u k | B U R N M A G A Z I N E
