“I felt like I wasn’t getting the credit for the things I was actually writing”: Corey Taylor says he went solo due to a lack of recognition in Slipknot and Stone Sour
“As someone who takes great pride in sitting down and creating something from nothing – just from my imagination – that stuck in my craw.”
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Corey Taylor has revealed that his solo career was driven by a lack of recognition for his songwriting in Slipknot and Stone Sour.
Speaking to Paste, Taylor – who recently released his second solo album, CMF2 – says: “Maybe this is where my ego comes into play, but I felt like I wasn’t getting the credit for the things I was actually writing.”
“With Stone Sour, it was fairly obvious, but there were a lot of songs that I wrote that people thought [guitarists] Jim [Root] or Josh [Rand] wrote where that wasn’t the case at all. And then, with Slipknot, there was a lot of stuff that either wouldn’t have been written without me, or that I wrote that other people gave [themselves] credit [for].”
He adds: “As someone who takes great pride in sitting down and creating something from nothing – just from my imagination – that stuck in my craw. I’ve never shied away from giving credit to the people who deserve it. I’ve never taken credit for anything that I didn’t do, and I’ve always been the first to shine the spotlight on anybody else. I don’t necessarily get that in return.”
Describing his solo career as an attempt to ‘set the record straight’ and ‘change the narrative’, Taylor says he hopes to show audiences that “‘Oh yeah, he does write heavy shit. And country shit. And acoustic shit. And piano shit. And rock shit. Hardcore shit’ – the gamut.”
As for his relationship with Slipknot, the musician says: “Oh, we’re good. We’re always up and down. We’re brothers, but we’re not always the best of friends. There’s a push and pull that comes with being in this band.”
“I haven’t blatantly said that I was going to leave or whatever, but what I have said is that, physically, I just don’t know how much longer I can do it. Between my spinal surgery, my knee surgery – a litany of health issues that I’ve had over the years – it’s getting harder and harder to do it.”
“Because I throw myself into the performance, when I come offstage and all of a sudden the adrenaline peels away, I’m left just beat to shit. [Laughs] It’s getting harder for me to maintain that. It could be five years, it could be ten, but there’s definitely a shelf life for how hard I can go. And if that’s the case, I don’t want to be the guy walking – or hobbling – around onstage trying to be the guy who he was 40 years before that. And the guys know that. And we all share that same feeling.”