I feel weird talking about it, because how can I, as the guitar player of Slipknot, sit here and say, 'Oh, I have trouble.' You know what I mean?
— Jim Root
The masks, for us, are more of a way to present ourselves live, you know?
We're closer friends in Stone Sour than I am with the guys in Slipknot and that makes life a lot easier. I'm not trying to take anything away from Slipknot.
People need to go back and figure out why it is that Slipknot plays the way it is. That way, maybe, you know, maybe every band doesn't start sounding the same anymore.
My first real real guitar I had was a Charvel, model 1 and that was when I was 15, I think, I got that.
I love 'Mad Max' and 'The Road Warrior,' in particular - those movies are very close to my soul, you know what I mean?!
I'm just kind of more, like, I'm gonna take every day as it comes and that's gonna be good enough for me.
To have a No. 1 with 130,000 copies sold is, you know, I remember when we first started selling records, in order to have a No. 1, you'd have to sell at least a half a million if not more, for the rock side of things.
There's such an energy and emotion to rock music, which is a lot of the reason I go back to '60s and '70s bands and look at some of the fire they had.
Well, basically Corey and I were in Stone Sour before we joined Slipknot.
Rick Rubin was able to do things that Dave Fortman could never do. I'm not trying to take anything away from Dave Fortman as a producer. He's extremely talented. He wasn't able to get nine people together on the same page and, to me, that's the most important thing in making a Slipknot record.
Music is like wine, it ages beautifully - and if you spend enough time you can just sit there and listen to it entirely differently.
I've started to look at guitar playing from more than just a standpoint of using certain modes and techniques.
With 'Iowa,' if you ask me, we really passed up a lot of things that we could have done with the two auxiliary drummers. I mean they hardly touched their drums on that album.
I think that the only goals that we try to set for ourselves is to evolve musically.
No, I would never in a million years compare anything we've done to anything we've previously done. I don't believe in it - I think it's bad.
Well that's probably what'll end up happening: a load of really good musicians who can't afford to be in bands, who have to have day jobs, you know what I mean? And then that's when you start losing a lot of the live touring bands.
It's probably a lot cooler than wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Once I put on the mask, I don't even realize that it's there. They're molded off of our faces, so they fit really well.
It's always been about the live show for us. We're having Halloween onstage every night.
I plan for the best and expect the worst.
I like to keep my world positive. There's enough negativity kicking around.
You know, 'Mad Max' and 'The Road Warrior' was part of my childhood, and that's why I'm so close to it. I remember seeing those movies at a drive-in theater with my parents when I was very young.
If you have a sickness, you gotta fix that sickness, but you can't keep putting somebody into treatment over and over and over again.
Everything happens for a reason.
I've seen the Tortilla Guy hashtag when I'm going through my Instagram and all of that and I think it's pretty funny. It's weird because I've met this guy before, I know who he is, but he's really kind of elusive, even around our camp. I've had some people tell me, 'Don't tell us who he is. We're having fun trying to figure it out!'
I think rock 'n' roll, in a way, has been dead for a long time.
Slipknot's the kind of band you need to step away from and kind of take a break from and let it heal, so to speak.
Dave Fortman really helped me appreciate Rick Rubin as a producer.
I can never look at anything I do subjectively - whether it's a Stone Sour record or a Slipknot record, I can never really have my own opinion of it, 'cos in my opinion it's all crap.
Some of the guys in Stone Sour, I think they just want to be a radio band and write strictly for radio and try to be more of a poppy rock band. And that's not really what I'm into.
You know, unfortunately I'm only one person. I can't really be in two places at one time and the amount of focus that I need to put into Slipknot makes it really difficult for me to be on tour with Stone Sour.
Iowa,' for me, I hated doing that album - it wasn't a good experience for me.
There are many different artforms that are just being lost because the whole digital revolution has homogenized everything, turned it all into Walmart.
I'm definitely a lot more reserved without the mask on. And with the mask on, all those inhibitions kinda go out the window. I can act like Keith Richards, I guess!
In a nine-piece-band is one guy gonna call up eight guys and have a 45-minute discussion about every decision? No. So things are a lot more democratic in Stone Sour. Plus, we're closer and it's a lot easier to communicate. In Slipknot that's the big problem - communication.
I'm extremely lucky to be doing what I'm doing right now and I work very hard at maintaining this career and living this dream that I'm living, but there's also a price to pay. I mean, we give a lot of ourselves and every day.
I have a hard time with any sort of criticism; not because I have some huge ego or anything like that.
I'm just a dumb guitar player, man.
I'm always living at least a year ahead of where I'm really at, and that can really lead you to some negative thoughts and some bad vibes.
You don't even know are we going to have a career? Are we going to be able to sell records? Are we going to have a label?
You always have to be on top of your game, because you never know what is going to happen.
People that like Slipknot that could care less about Stone Sour, people that like Stone Sour that don't know a lot of Slipknot.
Sometimes, hindsight is 20/20. Sometimes it takes another situation to kind of make you look back at a different situation and really see how good you had it, you know?
I'll never be able to listen to anything we've done like someone who's just picked it up for the first time.
I want to see the guitar in a non-linear sense that encompasses tones, arrangements, songwriting, audio production, and everything else - you have to do it all.
Don't get me wrong - I'm still way into the metal, but I've been listening to different things like Radiohead, Portishead, Bjork, and Queens of the Stone Age.
I'd rather be creative and be artistic and be able to play intricate music that moves and really takes you on a journey.
You could say, 'Oh, we're gonna write the heaviest album of all time' or 'We're gonna write an album that sounds like 'Iowa.'' Even if we set out to try to do so, it would never compare. We're not those people anymore, we're not that band anymore.
The culture of buying an album on CD or vinyl has gone out of the window. A lot of kids don't really understand that, they just hop onto Limewire, or find a BitTorrent, or even just go onto iTunes if they're going to pay for something. It's just right there, there's no searching about.
