Slipknot's Corey Taylor has spoken publicly about the death of his former friend and bandmate Joey Jordison, admitting that the drummer's passing on July 26 last year "broke my heart."
Taylor was asked about the loss of his longtime bandmate, and how he coped with the news of his death, during a question and answer session at the Mad Monster Party, a fan convention held annually in Concord, North Carolina.
"That's a tough one," the singer responded. "It hit me hard, even though I hadn't seen him or talked to him in a very long time. And I won't get into certain things, but I will say that it hit us all really hard.
"The first person that I called was Clown [Shawn Crahan] to make sure he was okay," Taylor continued. "Because those guys… I can remember going down and seeing them both at the gas station that Joey worked at [the Sinclair in Des Moines, Iowa] — like, way back in the day. And he would work the overnights. When I wasn't working at the porn shop, I would go down. And they were always scheming; they would always sit together scheming. It's, like, 'I've got this fucking idea. All right? We're gonna set our faces on fire.' And I was, like, 'No. You're really not gonna do that.'
"All that history and all the memories came back then. And his health was obviously part of that. And it was sad because this man was probably one of the most gifted people I've ever seen in my life… It was far, far too soon. And it broke my heart. Regardless of what had gone down between us, it broke my heart. It was a hard… It's still hard to think about. I think about it now and it doesn't seem real. So it hit us just as hard. It's one of the reasons why we pay homage to him and Paul [Gray, Slipknot's late bassist, who passed away in May 2010] at the end of [each] show... to make sure that people realise that even though he was gone, he's still part of the family, and he always will be."
Slipknot are set to return with their Joe Barresi-produced seventh studio album in late summer/early autumn.
"It's really killer, man," Taylor enthused to US metal media personality Eddie Trunk on his SiriusXM Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk show earlier this year. "It's darker than We Are Not Your Kind, but there's a ton of melody. I've been telling everybody that it's like a heavier version of Vol. 3. It's got so many textures and layers. The heavy stuff has attack but the melodic stuff you can just sink your teeth in; there's a lot of great melodies and hooks. I'm really, really excited for people to hear it."
