Corey Taylor Talks Stone Sour’s ‘Hydrograd,’ Beef With Nickelback & Writing a Book on Trump’s America
One of the best things about today’s release of new LP Hydrograd is Stone Sour can finally start playing even more of its 15 tracks in concert.The group is currently on the road in North America with Korn and just added the new single “Mercy,” to go along with a few of the other songs it’s been incorporating into the sets. And frontman Corey Taylor promises more will be coming.
“Some of the stuff is just built for playing on a stage, so we’re definitely gonna start working in some stuff here and there,” Taylor tells Billboard. “There’s a ton of stuff we’re really looking forward to playing.”
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There will be a lot of time to be playing it, too. With Taylor’s other band Slipknot on hiatus, Stone Sour is planning to “basically tour, tour, tour, man,” with more Korn shows, as well as a batch of late-summer festival dates and overseas plans.
“We’ve got some cool stuff coming down the pike that will happen later,” Taylor adds, which includes likely appearances at this year’s Knotfest festivals — one already announced for Oct. 28 in Toluca, Mexico, and with a U.S. date, again paired with Ozzy Osbourne‘s OZZFest, expected to be announced on July 10. Taylor adds it will be Stone Sour, and not Slipknot, that he’s playing with on those dates.
“Nothing’s being written, nothing’s being done. Everybody’s just doing their thing, which is fine,” Taylor says of Slipknot’s status. But he’s confident the group’s absence this year will help Knotfest in the long run.
“I think in a lot of ways your festival has to live past you, or it’s not gonna live at all,” Taylor explains. “If it has to live and breathe on your presence, then it’s not a festival, and it’s not for anybody else but you. And for us, it’s always been more about the art and the music and everybody… That’s why we put so much work into it to begin with, is to really make sure that it was stable and it was strong and the foundation was there.” A Knotfest documentary — Day Of The Gusano, filmed last year in Mexico — will premiere on September 6 in theaters.
While launching Hydrograd, Taylor has become embroiled in a war of words with Nickelback and the band’s frontman Chad Kroeger, with each dissing the other’s group. Now that the album’s out, however, Taylor is hoping to move beyond the beef.
“I have sworn that off, because everyone’s just ripping me to shreds and I’m trying not to talk about it,” he says. “I don’t know how much more I can do. Everybody just loves to turn everything that I say into f–king clickbait. I mean, what are you gonna do?”
Taylor’s other big project for the year is his new book, America 51: A Probe into the Realities That are Hiding Inside “The Greatest Country In The World.” Due out Aug. 8, the tome features Taylor’s thoughts on the state of the U.S., and had to be rewritten after Donald Trump was elected president last November.
“It refocused me in a way, and made me see that there are bigger issues in America than Trump,” he says. “There are bigger issues than having an orange president.”
Taylor hopes the book will encourage readers to feel the same way.
“It’s essentially me standing in the middle and trying to get people to come to the middle and talk, instead of standing on the outside extremes screaming at each other,” he explains. “Both sides are f–ked. Both sides have issues. Both sides are so convinced they’re right that they can’t see how f–king wrong they are. And it’s ugly. It’s not fair to the people who are actually trying to do something good for the country. It’s almost like everyone in this whole political discussion has become metal fans, because it is such a metal discussion. It’s like trying to convince someone that hates a certain band that they’re wrong; it’s such a waste of time and energy because that person is just going to turn their back on you immediately. It’s just sad.”
Taylor is no fan of Trump’s, calling his presidency “a f–kin’ mess.” But he does see some light at the end of the tunnel. “I think Trump is a one-and-done, because he was a reaction to something that there shouldn’t have been a f–king reaction to,” says Taylor, who’s already working on ideas for his next book.
“Once he’s out, s–t will realign. The balance will be back. I just think this was something that was going to happen, whether we liked it or not. It is what it is.”
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