Faster Louder recently conducted an interview with Corey Taylor in which #8 of Slipknot talked about Paul Gray, Slipknot, and the next Stone Sour. Below you can read a few excerpts from the chat.

Faster Louder: The white elephant in the room is obviously regarding the tragic death of your former bassist, Paul Gray, it’s obviously a difficult subject, but how have you reflected on it, and has it inspired you in any way?

Corey Taylor: “It’s been over a year now, and I’ve been slowly but surely talking a little bit more about it. Obviously it’s still with me, and it’s still hard to talk about it. But I’ve found the more I talk about it, the easier it is to deal with it.

“The biggest thing it has taught me, is to not take anything for granted, you know. Paul was one of those guys who really lived it. He lived it right to the hill. He fought his demons, but he didn’t let his demons control his personality. If you had just met him, you wouldn’t have thought that he was fighting those demons. He was such a sweet-heart, and there were times that I forgot that he had issues that he was fighting against, and it really kind of made him almost indestructible in my eyes. So when he passed, it fucked me up to be honest.

“It was hard, and it is still hard, but it taught me that you have got to cherish every day and cherish every moment. I don’t mean to be overly sensitive or anything like that, but you just have to take a minute in every day, and just reflect on where you are, and just realize what you’ve got, because you just never know where the next huge change in your life is going to come from. That’s the biggest lesson I’ve taken from it.”

Faster Louder: There are rumors that the next Stone Sour album is going to be a double concept album, can you shed some light on that, and what your influences were in writing it?

Corey Taylor: “I’ve been writing almost non-stop. The idea that I have is very grand, and if we do it right, it will probably be the biggest thing of our careers. There are influences from stuff like Alice in Chains, old school thrash like Anthrax and Megadeth, with some really cool acoustic passages.

“It’s going to hit on every cylinder and packed into the biggest engine ever, let’s put it that way. It’s a pretty serious story that I’m trying to weave in and out of all these riffs and stuff, so it’s really exciting. It’s basically the story of a man who’s trying to figure it out. He can’t figure out if he’s happier when he’s miserable, or if he’s miserable about not being happy. It’s almost like a mid-life crisis in a way. He’s young enough that he knows that there’s still a lot of life to live, but he’s old enough to realize that he can’t be hung up on the romance of teenage depression and youthful aggression. Stuff like that. So he’s really standing at the crossroads of his life, trying to figure out where he wants to go. There are stories about the people around him, stories about his romantic life, and there’s really this internal struggle where he’s going to burn forever or figure it out. Let’s put it that way.”

Source: Blabbermouth.net