Corey Taylor’s Solo Album Includes Song Written in High School

bill from jersey city, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
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Rumors have been rumbling about a Corey Taylor solo project for years, but the singer has always been too occupied with Slipknot and Stone Sour to make it happen beyond a few shows, songs and guest spots. That’s all about to change. The vocalist has been putting his quarantine downtime to good use and recently completed his first-ever solo album with a backing band consisting of Christian Martucci (Stone Sour) and Zach Throne on guitars, Jason Christopher on bass and Dustin Schoenhofer.

Taylor appeared on SiriusXM’s “Trunk Nation” on June 3rd and divulged more details about his solo project and the forthcoming record, which could be released as early as this fall. “It’s been a long time coming,” the singer said, as reported by Blabbermouth. “It was something that people have been asking me to do for years, and it was something that I always kind of put off, because how greedy can somebody be? I already have two bands. What more do I want? But then it just kept coming up, and then I just kept thinking about it, like, what would a solo album sound like? And that’s when I started really looking into my bag, and it was just, like, I’ve got all these songs that I’ve written that didn’t fit with either band. And that’s kind of what started this. I was gonna do this next year, but then, obviously, everything shut down, so it kind of afforded me the time to really go in and really concentrate on it and work with the people that I wanted to work with — friends of mine for 15-plus years, people who I’ve made music with or jammed with or played with that I knew exactly how it would sound with them on it. And we just did it right. Honestly, we all quarantined for two weeks, including the people in the studio that we worked at, and made sure that we had no contact with anybody else — no outside people — and we just all went in and did it together. And we did 25 songs in two and a half weeks. It was insane.”

Speaking to how old the material on his solo album is, Taylor told host Eddie Trunk, “A lot of this stuff is as new as I’ve written it in the last year or so, and some of the stuff is as old as … I mean, the first song on the album is a song that I’ve been working on since I was in high school. It’s a long, long, long time coming, and really maybe it was one of those things where it took years of working and honing my craft to have, I guess, the confidence to be able to complete that song. So, yeah, this is a long, long time of waiting and piecing it together, and it feel awesome.”

Taylor promised that he would be hitting the road in support of the solo album — although those plans are, of course, pending an end to the current COVID-19 shutdown of the live music circuit. “We definitely wanna do some solo shows,” the singer said. “Because everything is so tentative now — everybody is so scared to book anything yet [due to the coronavirus pandemic]. But if it comes down to it and people wanna take a chance and do a one-off or something, that’s what we’re kind of looking at right now. But, obviously, I still have commitments to Slipknot when everything kind of finally lurches back into place, so this will, obviously, kind of be put on hold again until after all those commitments are done, and then I’m gonna go on a full-on solo tour and do everything I can to promote that again.”