Corey Taylor claims Rick Rubin “couldn’t be bothered” during recording of Slipknot album
Corey Taylor has again criticised Rick Rubin’s work ethic during his work as a producer on Slipknot’s 2004 album Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses).
Taylor’s latest comments arrive after he previously publicly apologised to Rubin for lambasting him as “overpaid” and “overrated” following his experience of working with the producer. During a conversation with Apple Music in 2022, the Slipknot frontman said the issues were largely to do with him being newly sober, and needing a hands-on approach from the person operating the mixing desk.
“I didn’t have anybody there to help me. So I blamed him a lot – in retrospect, probably more than I should have. I feel bad about it. Hopefully some day I’ll be able to make some amends with him,” he apologetically told Zane Lowe.
However, Taylor, who is set to release his second solo album CMF2 on September 15th, has now agains spoken about his issues with Rubin’s methods as a producer and claimed it felt “like he couldn’t be bothered” to work with the group.
Speaking to Revolver about the collaboration, Taylor said: “Oh God, that was such a pivotal time in my life. I was in such a bad place, I don’t really have a lot of memory of the first half of making that album, because I was so fucked up all the time. The thing that sticks out is that there was such a sense of trepidation before the album even came out. We weren’t sure if anybody was even gonna dig it, you know? It wasn’t until people got a load of ‘Duality’ that everything changed.”
He continued: “We weren’t sure if people were gonna be ready for an album like that; we weren’t sure if we were ready for an album like that. And the recording of it left such a bad taste in my mouth that to this day I have a hard time listening to it. Obviously, a lot of it stems from how I feel about [producer] Rick Rubin; to me, Greg Fidelman produced that album, because Rubin wasn’t there. He just fucking wasn’t. And when he was, it’s like he couldn’t be bothered.”
Meanwhile, during a recent appearance on Steve-O’s Wild Ride podcast, Taylor accused bands who use backing tracks during their concerts of having “no heart”.
The frontman elaborated: “There’s no heart to it. Now the hip-hop community gets a pass because largely what they’ll do is they’ll throw the track on and then they rhyme over the top of it. But you can hear the double track on that, so you know they’re doing it, but they’re actually singing it live, singing along to themselves. However, there are people in my genre who not only have tons of Pro Tools going on, but they’re not physically singing as well.”
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