Corey Taylor has said that a lack of songwriting credit in Slipknot and Stone Sour partially inspired his solo career.
“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,” the frontman said in an interview with Paste.
“Maybe this is where my ego comes into play,” he continued, “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]. 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.”
Taylor co-founded Stone Sour in 1992, before disbanding it in 1997 when he joined Slipknot. The band was reactivated as a side-project in 2000 and placed on indefinite hiatus in 2020.
“It’s not that I don’t miss some of the guys in Stone Sour – I still talk to them,” Taylor told Rock Antenne in 2023. “But at this stage, I refuse to compromise my vision and my art because of certain people’s hindrances. And that’s all I’ll say.”
Taylor is currently promoting his second solo album, CMF2.
In an 8/10 review, Metal Hammer called CMF2 “a party album, pure and simple”.
“Corey Taylor and his band have built upon the strengths of its predecessor [2020’s CMFT] and refined their core sound into something distinct, forceful and utterly exhilarating,” concluded writer Joe Daly.
Taylor is currently touring the US with his solo band and will play across Europe and Australia in November and December.
Taylor will also perform at Hell And Heaven Festival as a part of Slipknot in Mexico City on November 3.
