Watch: Slipknot – The Negative One
MF: That brings us to Soundwave. It seemed like we had the official announcement for the album and the Soundwave lineup drop within a short space of time. Did you guys know you wanted to return to Australia as part of that tour?
JR: Absolutely, we always wanna come back, or at least I always wanna come back to Australia. Australia’s one of my favourite places on this planet to visit. And tours like Soundwave, they’re an experience to not just be able to play most of the major cities in Australia, but to have a couple of days off in all of them too… when you’re on tour, you don’t get a chance to really absorb the places you go.
But because of the way that tour was routed I was able to go snorkelling in the Indian ocean and I was able to take a ferry across the Sydney Harbour or whatever and go out to an island and eat dinner. I mean, there’s just so much you can do when you have that amount of time and it’s really awesome and it made me pretty passionate about Australia.
MF: Was it a band decision to keep exclusive to the festival? Can Aussie fans expect a return for a headline tour at some point?
JR: I definitely wanna come back there for a headlining tour, because I’ve heard and I’m not sure if this is true, but I’ve heard that Perth is not happening anymore for Soundwave.
MF: That’s true, yeah.
JR: Yeah, which I think is kind of a bummer, because I really like Perth a lot. Obviously, we’ve got a couple years at least of touring ahead of us so I’m sure the powers that be are putting their heads together to figure out how we can make it cost effective to be down in Australia and do a proper headlining tour on our own and make it so we’re not just spending money to be down there.
Fuck, I would love to do that. I mean, we haven’t been able to do a headlining tour down there in quite some time. Probably, shit, since the first record cycle, you know? So every other time we come down there it’s always a festival. I’d like to do both, that would be ideal.
MF: The way you guys have utilised the internet over the past couple of months has been nothing short of impressive. Do you feel like this could become a blueprint for other bands to promote their albums or would it really only work for Slipknot because you guys are such a singular entity?
JR: That’s a tough one, man, because the internet is really like the Wild West. It’s really hard to gauge what’s gonna happen and you never know what kind of shit’s gonna go viral or what’s gonna catch on or what the wave of sensation will be.
For us, we just simply wanted to go dark, because we’re at a day and age now where you can get on your social media and you can see what your favourite rockstar is eating for breakfast or if they’re dropping their kids off at school or they’re tweeting about current events, it just seems like it’s kind of taken a lot of the mystery and a lot of the what makes what we do special, away.
It makes everyone mere mortals again, which is cool. It’s nice to be in tune with what people that you admire do, but at the same time I think there’s something to be said about having a little anonymity and not knowing what’s going on so it may work for other bands, I don’t know.
For us, it was cool to just sort of take ourselves out of it for a while. And it just seemed to make sense with everything that’s going just to kind of shut off and tune out.
MF: How democratic have the decisions in the promotional campaign been? Has it all been spearheaded by Shawn and a couple of other members or has it been the result of group brainstorming sessions?
JR: It’s mainly Shawn that does a lot of that type of stuff. I kind of tend to concentrate on writing music and working in the studio and that side of things. Shawn really dives deep into the art, the photographs for the album, the art layout, art design, directing videos, things like that. I’m sure he’s probably working very closely, hand-in-hand, with out internet people and I’m sure that nothing happens without him putting it out there or saying, ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’
And that’s not to say that he’s not a creative force when it comes to writing music either, he writes a lot of the more Blur 13-esque stuff that makes it to the record and that’s a lot of my favourite stuff that we do.
MF: How is Slipknot’s future looking at the moment? Are you guys thinking years ahead or just focusing on getting the album out and this tour done?
JR: I don’t really know, ’cause like I said, now we’re back to having nine guys in the band and what people say and what people do are two different things. For me personally, I’m looking into the future of this band and that’s part of the reason I’m where I’m at is because of this band. Well, the whole reason I am where I’m at now is because of this band and I think for the legacy of Paul and all the time we’ve spent together it would be a shame to throw it all away.
But having said that, this band is an anomaly and we never what’s gonna happen and so we tend to just take things day by day, but everything’s looking really good right now and we’re getting along really well and everybody’s talking and we’re communicating. And I think that’s only gonna get better as we hit the road. We haven’t done a proper headlining tour since All Hope Is Gone. So this’ll definitely be something that’ll tell us a lot about our future, this album cycle.
MF: Corey’s described the new album as Vol. 3 meets Iowa. Would you agree with that summary?
JR: I don’t know if I would agree with that, because I don’t like to compare anything we do to anything that we’ve done or necessarily to anything else. I think that creates an expectation, you know what I mean? And I don’t like to put those expectations out there.
I know when I was younger, bands would say, ‘Oh, we’re coming back out with a new record and it’s gonna be like our second record’, and I’d hear their new record and it wasn’t anything like their second record and I was a little bit disappointed and I’m like, ‘Well, if they never would’ve said anything, I never would’ve had this expectation.’
So I don’t know what I would compare to this record to, I would just say it’s an evolution and it’s sort of a testament to where we’re at right now.
Slipknot’s new album ‘.5: The Gray Chapter’ is released 17th October. The band will headline Soundwave Festival in 2015.
