During a recent appearance on the TFW Frightmare, Corey Taylor was asked to single out his favorite SLIPKNOT album.
He responded: “My favorite album? Oh man, it’s weird because every album has its own identity and every album has its own great moments, and then moments of — call it calamity… It’s really weird, I don’t have any favorites…
“I will say the one that I think about the most, and even though it was the one that really had the most issues with, is [2008’s] All Hope Is Gone, just because that was the last album we did with all the original nine.
“It was the last time I got to work with Paul [Gray, bass, who died in 2010]. And it was, in retrospect, I remember having so much fun with him. But at the same time, there were so many issues going on in the band that was hard to concentrate and realize what we were doing and creating. So I’ve tried to go back and kind of cherry-pick the good moments from stuff like that.
“I do the same thing with [2001’s] Iowa ù I was in such a dark place when I was making Iowa, that it’s hard for me; it was hard for me for years to listen to that album because I was in such a f*cking gnarly place,” he continued. But now, obviously, hindsight’s 20-20 retrospect, you appreciate things differently. So I’ve been able to go back and embrace those processes, and just remember good things. So I have good stories about all the albums that I’ve been able to make been privileged to make.
“No album is perfect, or no album experience is perfect because there’s going to be adversity when you have that many people creatively trying to make something that’s never been done before. And that’s what we always try to do with every album, try to do something that nobody’s ever heard before. It’s going to be a war of wills, a war of stubborn personalities.
“But at the same time, when you can find that common ground that’s going to pull everybody together, you will experience something that you’ve never felt before, and you only feel with that group of people,” Corey added. That’s one of the reasons why we still do it. We’re such different people, but at the same time, we are all still very committed to what we do with SLIPKNOT. And that I think is what keeps us coming back in spite of broken knees and backs getting all f*cked up, and being set on fire, and all that sh*t, we still love the passion of it, and that’s why we still do it live today.”
