Slipknot and former Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor began a solo career because he felt a lack of credit for his work with those two bands.
Taylor, who recently released his second solo album, CMF2, claimed there had previously been a “misconception around who was writing what for what band”, which informed his decision to go it alone as a solo artist.
“When Stone Sour first started, not only was I playing guitar constantly, but I was also the lead guitarist and main writer,” he said in a new interview. “Honestly, one of the reasons why I was very adamant about starting my solo thing is that there was a weird misconception around who was writing what for what band”.
Regarding Stone Sour – the band he was in before Slipknot – Taylor explained during his conversation with Paste: “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.”
Detailing the similar experiences in Slipknot, Taylor continued: “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]. As someone who takes great pride in sitting down and creating something from nothing — just from my imagination — that stuck in my craw.”
The Slipknot frontman now feels like he’s “setting the record straight and changing the narrative” with his solo career. In his own words, he’s “showing people that, ‘Oh yeah, he does write heavy shit. And country shit. And acoustic shit. And piano shit. And rock shit. Hardcore shit’ – the gamut.”
Taylor concluded: “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.”
