Stone Sour's latest album, House of Gold & Bones Part 1,
comes out on Monday; it's the first half of a two-part epic that tells
the story of a man at the crossroads of his life. We got guitarist Josh Rand and frontman Corey Taylor
on the phone in separate interviews to talk about the genesis of the
album, the writing process and recording sessions, and much more. Our
interview with Corey will run on Monday - and now, here's Josh! Josh Rand What was the genesis of this album? Did Corey just come
to you and say, "This is what we're doing next"? What was your initial
response? Well, really, it all started last year. In
October, I went over to his house and he played me a couple of songs he
had written on or had put together, and he explained the whole concept
or story of doing this concept record. And I immediately was excited,
because I felt like from a musical standpoint it would allow us to do
whatever we wanted. Not that we haven’t done that in the past, but I
really felt like it could really open some doors musically. And how we
write as a band is, all of us contribute from the music side of things,
and he’s always written the lyrics. So the biggest thing for me was, I
wanted us to be a lot more aggressive than Audio Secrecy. Can
we go in that direction? And he was like yeah, let’s do it all. And that
was when I really started giving him the stuff I had written on, later
on in the year, like December. I flew down to Jacksonville, and Jim [Root]
just jams, that’s how he writes, so it’s usually me that’ll sit down
and go through all the stuff he records, 'cause he’s very much an improv
player. And I started pulling a couple of ideas from that, and Roy [Mayorga] started submitting stuff, and we got together in January in Des Moines and just started putting everything together.
Was everybody in the band on board from the beginning, or did some people take some convincing? We
were all on board. Our approach, when I look back on it basically a
year later, it was almost a '70s vibe, where we wanted to be more
experimental for ourselves and grow as musicians, and tell a story and
have it be more than just "Here’s our 10 best songs." And in my opinion,
a band doesn’t even do that anymore, it’s like, "Here’s the song we’re
gonna push on radio, and eight to nine filler tracks." So our approach
was, we wanted to make sure everything got the same amount of love.
Going into it, we had no idea what would be the singles. Credit
[producer] Dave Bottrill for that, 'cause he came in
and he’s like, “We’re gonna do it as a big piece of art, and it’s gonna
be this big thing from start to finish, and if there’s songs in there
they wanna take to radio, then so be it.” But he really helped also with
the musical landscape of the record. You're not seen as a concept album kind of band; were you
worried that some fans might hear that phrase and think, "Yeah, maybe
I'll check you guys out again on the next one"? I don’t think so, because I still think it’s us. We never said that we would be Genesis or Dream Theater or Yes
or any of those types of bands. We’re not a prog band. We said, we’re
going to adopt the ideas of those stories and stuff, but it’s still
going to be a Stone Sour record, where you can still
pull those individual songs. We just wanted to offer something more - in
a world where it’s all about singles, we just wanted to do something
different. We’ve always evolved from record to record, if you listen to
our entire catalog. It was another way of challenging ourselves and
making it interesting and fun for us to make. When we did Audio Secrecy, a lot of people feel like the difference between that and Come What(ever) May is that we mellowed out. Well, going into Audio Secrecy, our whole goal was not to make Come What(ever) May
again. Which we didn’t, for better or for worse, depending on who you
talk to. And that was the same mindset going into this, except for now
we have this story and musically it felt like the handcuffs had been
taken off a little bit. From a heavier approach – we had gotten away
from that over the last 10 years, so it was kinda cool to bring that
aspect back into the band. Are the lyrics 100 percent Corey, or do other people
contribute lines or ideas? And what's your creative partnership like
generally? First off, he always does all the lyrics. One of
us might go, “Hey, what about this line?” Every once in a while, I’ll
say “This line bugs me.” Or “What if you said this?” But overall he’s
the guy that does the lyrics and on this record, he’s the guy who wrote
the short story, so… How we work is, musically, I’ll write down how I
think the song should be or a structure, and when I get it to where I’m
happy then I give it to him, and he’ll either tell me to rewrite certain
parts, or switch stuff around, or he’ll just write lyrics to it as it
is. We’ve had songs in the past where I’ve sent him music, he’s written
lyrics, and that’s how the song is, and there’s other times where it’s
like “What if you change this?” or “What if you change this riff?” So
that’s how we write. And then bringing in the other two, like I said,
with Jim, he does so much improv and records that way that it’s usually
helping him build those songs, whether it’s me going through that same
process, or Corey. “Absolute Zero” is a perfect example of that. In
2008, I went down to Florida for like a week and I ended up hearing this
riff on one of Jim’s hard drives, and I was like, “This riff is the
shit.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out anything to build around it,
and when we went to do Audio Secrecy it just kind of got
shelved. Well, that riff ends up being the main riff for “Absolute
Zero.” And that song is literally a collaboration of one of Jim’s riffs,
one of Corey’s riffs, and one of mine, and I kinda built that song.
Are there any riffs or melodies from Part 1 that reappear on Part 2, to tie things together? Yeah, there are. There’s a couple of themes. The bridge for “Absolute Zero” will reappear on Part 2 as a pre-chorus to one of the songs, and then there’s a couple of melody themes that go in and out on Part 2 that are on Part 1. The sessions were pretty fast - you recorded two albums
in the time it would normally take to do one. Did you get everything how
you wanted it, or do you wish you could make just one more overdub,
even if it's something only you'll ever notice? That’s an interesting question, because we were so focused on doing this record – once again, I’ll go back to Audio Secrecy,
where we all got together in January and we lived in this big house and
it took us six months to record that record. This was a little bit
different, where we had a deadline because [Corey and Jim] had to go
tour with Slipknot and really we kinda did
pre-production as we recorded, and I think the freshness of it really
helped the record. Could you want more time? I’m sure every artist would
say they’d love to have more time, but then you can end up
overproducing it and you kind of lose the magic, in my mind. One thing
we also wanted to strive for with this is, we feel like we’re a great
live band, and we’ve had these great, produced, polished records, but we
didn’t have the energy we felt like live. We wanted the rawness back,
almost like the first record, and if you spend a lot of time in there
you start second-guessing yourself instead of just going off of your
initial decision on things. So us having more time – I think honestly it
would have been damaging, looking back at it. I think what made this
record what it is that everybody came together, everybody was
super-focused, there was a newness and an excitement, and none of the
songs were beat to death before we got to record ‘em.
You're heading out on the road soon...how many songs are you going to be performing live? It
all depends which market. It’s gonna rotate. I’m gonna say ballpark, at
this point, five. As I said, it all depends where we’re at. In South
America, we’re gonna do four. But when we get to Europe, there’s been
talk of doing five, possibly six. And by the time we get to the US next
year, who knows where we’ll be with it. I’d be leaning more toward five
or six by then.
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