Devin Townsend: pure rawk interview

N: At the start of 2009, you announced this four-album series called The Devin Townsend Project – what was the reason behind that? Too many ideas for one CD?

DT: Usually I’ll get down the feelings about how I feel about the period of my life at the time. Moments of emotional importance to me. There have been periods of time that have been very intense, not very intense, full anger, full of sadness or just plain boring. After Strapping the amount of things in my life had changed were more than I’d ever had to process in any one time and as a result of that I found that my writing was veering off in four – sometimes even more directions. At first I was trying to figure out how to make it all speak in one 74-minute long chunk and it just ended up being so disjointed in terms of one song into the next. Like I was trying to fit “Stand” after “Lady Hell”, “Addicted” after “Demon League” and it just ended up not working. My first impression was that these songs just had a kind of schizophrenic element that I don’t quite understand but allowing them all to be in their own space and allowing them to breathe a little bit – and not having to be dependent on the transitions of songs to flow between each other – you only got like, two seconds between each one to make this work, right? Like this the statements started making a lot of sense unto themselves and finding that there were songs and thoughts that ended up being chronologically between the four – the way they’ve been presented in summarised that whole period of personal change rather than ‘neuter’ them and put them all into one single or double record.

N: “Deconstruction” and “Ghost” – they’re coming out at a similar time?

DT: The very same day as each other. more

Comments