Rockezine.com interview with Stone Sour on Jun 17, 2002

with Josh Rand & Corey Taylor on Jun 17, 2002

At the Roadrunner headquarters in Naarden, the Netherlands I talk to Josh Rand and Corey Taylor about Stone Sour. Corey, of course, is known as the singer of Slipknot. Stone Sour however was formed long before he joined the masked band. Now it’s time to return to the roots with his long time friend and guitarist Josh.
		Judging from the biography it seems that the reincarnation of Stone Sour was almost inevitable. Josh and Corey explain what happened through the years. Josh: It went back, let’s see, it was ’92 when it was formed by Corey and the drummer, Joel Eckman. From there they added bassist Shawn Economaci. I came in, briefly, on guitar and it didn’t work out for me. They finally ended up with James Root (a.k.a. Jim) and played for about two years. Then Corey left for Slipknot… Corey: …and Jim and Shawn started Dead Front and Joel started a family and then when Josh left, we asked Jim to join Slipknot. Shawn came out as our tour manager and that was it. Josh: Skipped four years. January 2000 they played a show in Des Moines and I talked to him (Corey) and told him I wanted him to check out a couple of songs I wrote. He wrote lyrics for them which ended up being Get Inside and Wicked. We kept writing songs when he was not touring. A year went by and then we kind of demoed it and actually did like fourteen songs. Corey: We’ve been writing songs together since we were sixteen. Like, four track shit. It wasn’t exclusive to doing something like this. We just worked really well together. We knew how to work with each other. We had no problem saying: ‘Ok, all this works but this doesn’t.’ And we’ve done it so long that there’s no problem with it. So we started doing demo’s and stuff and it was getting pretty serious. It was like: this is good, what should we do? So we called Joel up. We wanted to put a real organic band together. At this time Stone Sour wasn’t even being thought about. This was just something for us to play these songs. We called Joel, we called Shawn, we started jamming together. I was doing double duty with guitars and singing. I didn’t feel comfortable with it and the only person we wanted to work with was Jim. He joined in and it just became what it was. When it became time to really figure it out, the names we’d been picking out all belonged to other people. After the third name was taken I called everybody up and said: ‘Look, Stone Sour man there’s just no way to get around it. Let’s go for it!’
		People might expect Stone Sour to be a side project but it isn’t. It’s a band and it’s very different from Slipknot. It’s a rock band and a lot more diverse. Josh: I consider us just a rock band and I honestly don’t want to put a label on it because it’s so diverse. It’s a real band, not a project. Corey: This is for real. The cool thing about our contract is that it’s open ended. They basically said: let’s do an album see, how it goes and then kinda go from there. That’s the best thing to do. When you get locked into a fuckin’ record deal that says you have to put out so many records in so many years there’s a lot of pressure. With Slipknot that’s the way it was. We were locked in for a great deal of time, let me just say that, and there was a lot of pressure trying to figure out how we were going to fill this up. With this band [Stone Sour] we could fuckin’ write songs forever. So there’s no problem. Josh: ‘Get Inside’ will be the first single… Corey: It will be a metal single for metal radio. Then we’ll kinda crossover with ‘Bother’. You know, we just want to floor it. Just write songs we dig and other people dig. That’s the cool thing about this band. It’s almost a reverse of Slipknot. Slipknot is so all over the place in the metal realm but it’s very stringent in what we can do. With Stone Sour there are no limitations at all. We can do whatever we want. It’s a total fuckin’ lifetime thing.
		The semi-ballad ‘Bother’ will be featured on the Spiderman Soundtrack. That’s pretty cool for a band that hasn’t even released its debut album yet. Corey: Tell me about it! I’m a Spiderman freak. That was the cool thing. That’s when everything really started picking up. I’d done a demo for ‘Bother’ and it ended up in the hands of Denise Louiso at Sony and she was putting together that soundtrack. She heard it and was like: ‘Shit! We gotta record this!’. So we flew out and did in one night. It’s funny because it’s being played all over the place but nobody is working it as a single. All these radio stations are playing it on their own. There’s nobody behind it going: ‘You play this. We need twenty spins.’ It’s all word of mouth and that’s pretty cool man.
		Although Josh and Corey do most of the promotion the others are just as important in the band. Corey: Everybody’s just as important. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for everybody in the band. I handle a lot of the business, I take care of a lot of stuff, but it’s all for one and one for all. We’ve all been friends since we were young. So we can basically tell each other to fuck off and it’s not going to be in the press. So it’s cool to be able to share this with people outside of Des Moines. I have no fear of getting in a fight with any of these guys. Josh: [Laughing] Until Jim comes up, who’s taller than him! Corey: No that’s not what I’m saying. I have no fears about… -plus I ain’t scared of him, fuck him! Ha ha…- I have no fear of getting in an argument with these guys. Josh: That’s the cool thing. Since we have known each other for so long we can get in the argument and say: ‘Fuck you’ and half an hour later talk to the person and say: ‘Hey, why don’t you come over’. That’s how it is. It’s like a brotherly love and sometimes… I’ve really wanted to strangle him [points at Corey] ha ha ha! But you get over it, obviously you have your differences, and you move on. Cause all of us have the same goal: what’s best for the band.
		Corey writes all the lyrics for Stone Sour. They’re quite different from the Slipknot lyrics. Corey: It’s a total different spot, isn’t it? With Slipknot it’s rage. A lot of personal pain. Whereas this is… it’s the same kind of thing but you can almost step outside of it and write from a totally different point of view. You don’t have to cry all the time. You can actually make statements, make observations. It’s not a soap box. You write what the song feels like. With Slipknot the music almost fuckin’ dictates you have to bludgeon yourself. With this it’s almost like you have a thought that you want to express and you take it to it’s natural conclusion. I put the same conviction behind it, but at the same time it’s more… I guess common knowledge. It’s a little more accessible. It’s absolutely personal because with this I can talk about anything. I mean in Slipknot I can’t talk about love, you can’t talk about relationships, you can’t talk about how the government fucks you over every fuckin’ second of the day. I touch on those things in this band. And it’s a good thing. Cause if you cut yourself off of that then that muscle dies. So it’s good to be able to have this. So you can keep challenging yourself and push the boundaries.
		Corey’s vocals on Stone Sour songs are clean and melodic. For those who know him long enough it’s not a surprise. Corey: This is what I was doing before I went to Slipknot. I never screamed before I joined Slipknot. Josh: It is kinda funny because everybody hears ‘Bother’ and goes: ‘That can’t be Corey’ and I said the same thing when I heard Slipknot. Corey: Yeah, I was writing stuff like ‘Bother’ years a go. It’s great and very cleansing to be able to come back to that. It’s so freeing, so liberating to be able to step away from that [screaming in Slipknot] and to be able to do something like this. And be able to jump back and forth between the two.
		The (unmastered) promo sounds very organic. Not as overproduced as most rock bands sound today. Stone Sour deliberately chose to record it analogue. Josh: We totally bypassed anything digital. Everything was done analogue. Most of it is recorded live. The guitars and the bass were recorded along with the drum tracks. We had to go back to certain parts but we tried to keep the live take. That’s what I’m most proud about when I listen to it, because nobody really does that anymore. Everybody’s Pro Tools crazy and editing everything exactly perfect. Corey: Pretty much everything that you hear on that CD is what you’re going to hear live. The little stuff that we did for ‘Ear Candy’ is so minimal that when you see us live you can’t even tell it’s not there. We’re actually better live. We just fucking go for it. We don’t fuck around.
		Stone Sour have already played two live shows and they were quite successful. Corey: Once we had everything ready for the album we did a show in Des Moines. And then we did a show in L.A. in The Whiskey for a video. It was fucken nuts! We were really worried that the Slipknot kids wouldn’t get it and they fuckin’ dug the shit out of it! I mean they were fucking into it. I just hope we can do that everywhere. We’re going to tour America first and try to build up some money so we can actually come over here [Europe]. Our live show is a total reflection of the music. It’s stripped down, bare boned. It’s basically just us on stage playing. So it’ll cost us next to nothing. Our motto is: if you’ve got an electrical outlet we’ll fucking play. Josh: [The reactions were] actually really good. Of course at home it was insane. L.A. was actually the trial. And it went over better than everyone expected. From as far as I’ve seen on fan sites about 85% people were really digging it. I haven’t been hit with a bottle yet. Corey: Actually in Australia I got fuckin’ full faced with a huge bottle of piss [When playing with Slipknot – W]. I looked down and saw the fucker who’d done it and he was like: ‘Yeah, you fucking kick ass!’ It was fuckin’ hilarious though.
		The seven song promo that was sent to the European press hasn’t leaked to the internet yet. The band and the record company were able to prevent that. Corey: We really kept a lid on that. Probably by the time we get back somebody will have booted the seven song thing that was over here and it’ll be on the web. I think a lot of bands leak that shit on purpose. And we want to keep the mystique. We want to lure people in one at a time with the songs that we put out. That’s how they did it in the old days. You had to find it when it came out. Now it’s so easy to fuckin’ download that shit and you don’t even know it’s that band or not. Case of point: that ‘School Worse’ thing we’re going through [with Slipknot – W] in Germany. Slipknot’s never written a song called ‘School Worse’. Apparently there was some ‘School Worse’ song on the internet by Slipknot. So it’s like half of the time anything you download on the internet you don’t know if it’s that band or not. So fuck that. When I can go out and buy the album, have the art, have all the lyrics, have everything. Have the package.
		Then, after discussing the seven song promo, the time is up and we had to leave it at that. During that conversation Corey enthusiastically unveiled: I’m gonna try to get it [the Stone Sour album] on vinyl. Fuckin’ awesome dude!
(Walter de Korver)