Slipknot’s Corey Taylor gives details of his debut solo album

Corey Taylor has finished recording his debut solo album. The Slipknot frontman discussed his first non-band affiliated project with Terry Bezer for Knotfest.com’s weekly hard rock chat show, Mosh Talks.

Coronavirus lockdown forced Slipknot to abandon their 2020 tour plans, providing Taylor with the perfect opportunity to jump in the studio. “I threw down the gauntlet and I recorded my first solo album. And it’s really, really good,” Taylor said. “It’s something I was planning to do anyway next year when I got off the road with Slipknot. And I figured…why not try and do it?”

Taylor assembled a band and called in Stone Sour producer Jay Ruston to record the album at The Hideout Recording Studio in Las Vegas. Taylor already had the material backed up. “This was stuff that I had written as early as the last Slipknot tour and as far back – there’s a song on here that dates back to when I was in high school,” he said.

“It’s just stuff that I’ve had floating around me that didn’t really fit with either band. It was a different energy, a different vibe. The more people asked me if I was ever going to do a solo thing, I started going, ‘well, I kind of know what it would sound like because I’ve got all these songs that really never had a home anywhere else.’”

The group recorded a total of 25 songs in just two and a half weeks. It was predominantly recorded live in the studio, with vocals, piano and some acoustic guitar being overdubbed.

“We did 13 originals. We recorded seven covers. And then we did six acoustic versions of the originals that we put together,” said Taylor. “We did an insane amount of work in two and a half weeks. [It’s] something that we thought was going to take two months and we destroyed it – we were doing a song a day.”

So what does the new material sound like? “It’s everything that I wanted it to be,” said Taylor. “There’s some Slade in there. There’s some Johnny Cash. There’s some Alice in Chains. There’s some big choruses, fun rock, just huge solos – huge solos. It’s incredible.”