“They say idle hands are the devil’s plaything, so I like to knit,” says Corey Taylor from the lobby of The Fillmore in Minneapolis, where he’s set to play the third show of a US solo tour. “It’s a burgeoning sport. I’m into speed knots, which is kind of funny as I’m in Slipknot, but a slip knot is actually not one of the faster knots.”

It’s hard to tell if the singer is kidding about his hobby, but he did learn how to crochet for a role in the 2022 movie Rucker. He further quips that “somebody threw a live duck onstage” during the previous night’s gig in Kansas City. This time the joke is obvious, although he’s seen his share of weird shit over the years.

A few months shy of his 50th birthday, Corey Taylor is his own kind of mature. Older and wiser, yes, but still a guy who has a fowl sense of humor and includes farts on his new album (more on that later).

Yet in talking with Taylor, one is struck by his level-headed sensibility. Hailing from Des Moines, Iowa, he has a Midwestern groundedness about him — a wisdom built on successes and setbacks.

There was a time when the skull-numbing downtime of tour might have led him to more destructive time-killing habits than working yarn with crochet hooks. In his recent past, he may have spent that dead hour in the venue lobby relentlessly tweeting on his phone, posting hot takes — for which he became notorious — that would soon become clickbait headlines. Instead, Taylor forsook social media in 2017 after he found himself doom scrolling at the dinner table with his family. His daughter pleaded with him: “Daddy, get off the phone.”

Whatever official social accounts still exist, the content is handled by one of his associates, primarily promoting new music and live shows. “I handed everything over to this person who was a friend of mine who I have kind of run my sites. And I was like, ‘Change all the passwords. I don't want to know anything.’”

Seven years later, he enthuses, “It was the best fucking decision I ever made — so good for my mental health and just my peace of mind. Now everyone I have a real relationship with are my friends who are in my life.”

And for those “What Does Corey Taylor Think?” meme creators out there, don’t worry: You’ll still get the singer’s opinions, whether it’s through interviews or onstage rants. As the musician himself tells us, “You still know what Corey Taylor thinks about everything!”

Forgoing social media is just one example of Taylor’s maturity and growth as a person, public figure, and artist. While he’s found himself in a few high-profile feuds over the years, he’s mostly a tornado of positivity these days — and it’s no surprise that his fans have stuck with him for a quarter century.

That said, the light wasn’t always bright in Taylor’s life. He battled alcoholism for many years before getting sober in 2010. “[I was] dealing with my own various addictions and fighting the depression that I had to deal with for years – the trauma that kind of came from when I was growing up.”

As he’s detailed in the past, Taylor’s rough childhood included being raised in poverty by a single mom, a sexual assault at the age of 10 by a neighborhood teenager, and a suicide attempt at age 18, among other hardships.

Later in life, he watched from afar as the grunge singers he idolized perished, their bodies abused and their minds tormented. Their music had meant much to him. “Over the years, music was my only form of solace. It was the only thing that really ever made me feel like there was hope in the world. There was always a form of music or a song that was waiting for me to discover it.”

Taylor says the path out of addiction is there “if you’re ready to see it.” Sadly, Layne Staley never found it. Neither did Scott Weiland. But others helped Taylor find the way, whether directly or indirectly. He particularly points out Metallica’s James Hefield and Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell as inspirations.

“I think one of the people who helped me kind of figure it out was James Hetfield. When he first started his journey, getting sober and getting healthy and whatnot, I looked at that, and I was like, ‘Well, shit, if he’s strong enough to do it, maybe I can try it.’ [Sobriety] had a big enough effect on me that, over the years, I’ve really tried to stick with it.”

Taylor continues, “In figuring that out, I also realized that there were so many people who were going down that path, as well. Jerry Cantrell had just gotten sober around that time, and he was starting to kind of put his steps together.”

Yet, the singer warns that it’s not a “fix all” when you get clean.

“It takes time; it takes effort, takes work. I really have to give [Hetfield] a lot of credit for the inspiration for that… It definitely helped to know that I wasn't alone in it. And it certainly helped me clear my head and focus more. And really get down to writing again – really, truly writing.”

Taylor’s new sophomore solo album, CMF2, and its predecessor CMFT, released in 2020, show that artistic clarity. They’re crackling and rambunctious — records that sound like they were fun to make. Even the album titles are bold statements of self-celebration: Corey motherfucking Taylor.

The man has every reason to be confident. He owns his past and speaks without reservation about the tribulations and challenges he’s overcome to reach this moment in his life. In many ways, CMF2 is a career retrospective of an artist who has continued to evolve and shapeshift — quite literally, in terms of Slipknot. Duff McKagan put it aptly in an open letter he penned as part of the press kit for CMF2.

“There are those individuals who have to do music,” wrote Duff. “There are songs and rhythms and lyrics in these particular people that simply must come out. The best of these types also inject some real truth-telling into us, the listeners, and that is when we know we can trust what it is we are hearing. Corey Taylor has been doing all of this for over 20 years now.”

Taylor sat on the idea for the Sgt. Peppers-esque cover art for CMF2 for years: a mannequin gathering of Corey Taylors from various eras, a wax museum of his past selves and personas, masked and unmasked. The sleeve is rife with homages — a couple celebrating the Midwest, such as the Iowa license plate and the purple for Prince (“Not just because of his music, but the fact he came from the Midwest”). Most of all, Taylor says he’s nodding to the late David Bowie, the quintessential musical chameleon.

“David Bowie… he’s kind of my musical spirit animal,” Taylor shares.

Like Bowie, Taylor has proven that his talents can transcend and morph between genres and styles, and CMF2 epitomizes that fact. His whole musical lexicon is on the table, from brooding Alice in Chains-y alternative rock (“Dead Flies”) to pop-ish metal (“Beyond”) to punk rock (“Talk Sick”). Even his cited folk influences like Ani DiFranco and Ray LaMontagne are represented on the softer acoustic numbers (“Breath of Fresh Smoke” and “Sorry Me”).

There’s no line drawn between Stone Sour and Slipknot here; any of those Corey Taylors on the cover can manifest at any time. This is “truly writing” as Taylor put it — writing with freedom and trust in the creative impulses. Inevitably, this opens the portal to all those old Coreys, all songwriters of their own.

It helps to have a gang of buds — bassist Eliot Lorango, drummer Dustin Robert, and guitarists Zach Throne and Christian Martucci — to help bring the songs to fruition. When asked about the vibe in the recording studio during the making of the album, Taylor’s face lights up.

“We will chase an idea down, but the whole time we're doing it, we're laughing our tits off,” he says. “It's fucking nonstop buffoonery in there. It doesn't help that it's five dorks making really good music.”

Underlining that maturity doesn’t preclude puerility, he confirms there is indeed audible flatulence on the record.

“That’s our Easter egg. Well, it smells like a rotten Easter egg. If you can find it, it is fucking violent sounding. It sounds like somebody ripped through some fucking underwear. That’s the level of ridiculousness that you're dealing with with this band.”

Recorded farts aside, the band goes full bore on most of these tracks. Producer Jay Ruston cultivated an old-school recording environment that nurtured both playful shenanigans and airtight performances.

Notably, the instruments sound like instruments. The amps sound like amps. The cymbals crash with a dynamic fidelity. Conventional wisdom implies that this should always be the case; however, as Taylor is all too aware, modern rock — especially hard rock — often takes the shortcut of overusing plugins and neutering performances. Taylor credits Ruston for retaining that realness on CMF2, which was tracked live with minimal overdubbing.

“That’s what differentiates him from all of the quote-unquote modern producers, because they rely so much on the computer for the talent,” Taylor muses. “That just ends up sounding like a fucking straight line from point A to point B, where as Jay knows how to create the journey with us.”

One example of this organic process netting tangible creative gains comes on the intro to “Talk Sick.” Wielding an electric guitar, Taylor plays through a mini amp the size of a coffee cup, giving the opening riff a punchy, sharp-edge. A similar effect could have been achieved by some alchemic balance of compression plugins and knob twiddling, but would it really have sounded the same as miking up that tiny amp with an SM57?

For Ruston and Taylor, that answer is a resounding, “No.” But they are becoming the exception rather than the rule, in this regard. Old-school purists. Sonically, CMF2 is the aural equivalent to a blast of fresh air — most obvious when hearing the singles on radio, for example, when they’re juxtaposed against other Active Rock hits. These tracks cut.

“If you're just throwing elements at a piece of music and it doesn't feel like a song, then you're wasting the opportunity,” says Taylor, summarizing his recording ethos. “For me, the song will always be king. So you can't overdo it.”

Unfortunately, industry trends are moving further and further from the organic studio practices of Taylor and his producer. Seemingly everyone has an inflammatory opinion regarding the use of pre-recorded tracks in the live setting, and now artificial intelligence is being used to create entire songs. It’s all trending toward convenience and less effort, but for Taylor, AI in music is horror incarnate.

“I don't know why people, why humans are so afraid of their own capacity to create things,” Taylor says. “It just seems like the technology these days is just designed to do heavy lifting for humans who are completely capable of fucking creating and having an imagination. I think it's horseshit. I will always think it's horseshit. I will never fucking use it. I will never be a part of a project that does that. If anyone tried to do that, I would probably go out of my way to destroy whatever it was.”

On a broader level, Taylor worries AI’s use in music is putting the general public on “another fucking slippery slope for us to start turning on each other.” He argues that the “fucking horrible conflicts” suffocating our culture result from a lack of faith in truth. “One of the reasons why nobody trusts what they read or trust what they fucking hear anymore is because we give them too many reasons to doubt it,” he says.

Turning to AI for artistic creation just further calls into question what we think of as true: “Because at the end of the day, even if you see it with your own eyes, how the fuck do you believe it?”

When it comes to seeing things with your own eyes, there’s always been an air of mystery surrounding Slipknot. The band has undergone a number of lineup changes in recent years, without immediately disclosing the new members’ identities. Taylor, however, is so identifiable with Slipknot that it’s hard to imagine the band continuing on without him.

Still, as far as Slipknot is concerned, the word “retirement” has appeared in recent interviews with Taylor, as the intensity of the band's live shows has taken a significant physical toll on the frontman. In one conversation, he said that Slipknot could carry on without him if he chose to retire before the rest of the band was ready to call it a day. Sensible as ever, he doesn’t view that decision in personal terms. It’s about his bandmates’ livelihoods.

“I would never try to hold them back, because it's my decision to take myself off the road, and if they wanted to continue touring, who am I to fucking tell them that they can’t?” he says. “Now does that mean that the audience will accept it? I don't know.”

Being in a masked band does make it a tad easier to ride into the sunset with minimal distraction, but you won’t see Taylor pulling the wool over his fans’ eyes. “I would certainly never put the band out with a different singer and not let the audience know that it wasn't me.”

Pressed on whether there was any possibility that his look-alike son Griffin could assume his role as No. 8, Corey pushes back on the idea that has been floated around by certain Slipknot fans.

“I don't know if he’d want the gig,” he said of his son, who’s about to turn 21. “I think he's too into making his own music, which is fine. I encourage him to stay there.”

Griffin is the frontman of Iowa metal act Vended, which also features drummer Simon Crahan, son of Slipknot percussionist Shawn “Clown” Crahan. In many ways, Griffin is following a similar career trajectory as his father, fronting a young metal band from Iowa. Roughly 25 years ago, Corey and Slipknot were in that very position, fighting to be heard. To their collective amazement, the band’s 1999 self-titled album became a modern metal revelation.

“When it took off, no one was more fucking surprised than we were. We were just like, ‘The fuck is happening?’,” he recalls. “The odds should have just really played out a different way. And yet I think because of how real we were, how frenetic we were, especially in that timeframe, people were just hungry for something that was a little more insane.”

Taylor was 24 at the time, and he calls making that first album some of the most fun he’s ever had in his life. It changed everything.

“Everything was sick. Everything was gnarly. And I just remember us walking out of the side door at [the studio] Indigo Ranch and walking out and just looking at paradise out in front of us, man. And just going, ‘How the fuck did we get here? Is this real? Will it ever be this good again?’ I was like, ‘We're fucking making it now.’”

As Taylor wraps up this interview, a day of pre-show activity awaits: soundcheck, rest, catered meals, meet and greet, cross stitching — in some order. It’ll be the same routine in dozens of other cities. He’s long since weeded out the negatives — the addictions, the social media — and it’s all gravy from here on out. He’s made it now.

Minus the toxic stuff, plus some graceful aging, and with an equal amount of frivolity, the seasoned vet has found the idyllic rock ‘n’ touring life. And Taylor knows the value of performing, saying it’s the most important part of maintaining your fanbase, whether it’s playing to thousands like he does in Slipknot or more intimate spaces with his solo act.

Contrasting the live experiences, he says of the larger concerts, “You walk out and you see a shit ton of people and you're like, ‘Oh, this is dope.’ But at the same time, it's like playing a show for the mountains. Good luck getting any connection there. When you're in a big club or a small theater, the people are right there and you can vibe off each other. You can look in their eyes. You see the excitement.”

He’s been enjoying bringing CMF2 to audiences, and is as excited as ever to introduce the tracks to more crowds. They can see 25 years of personas on the cover of the new LP, but it’s the version he’s putting in front of them now – battle-scarred but still fun-loving – that he hopes leaves a lasting impression.

“If they go out and [say], ‘You should have seen fucking Corey Taylor. That was fucking amazing.’ That, to me, is the essence of it.”

Get tickets to Corey Taylor's upcoming tour dates here. Fans of Taylor and this cover story can pick up an exclusive merch capsule created in collaboration with the artist, available now at the Consequence Shop. With photography by Marin Hunter, the bundle features a photo print of the cover image and a T-shirt printed with a "pinup patch" cutout of the singer himself. Bundle them together for a discounted price!