Corey Taylor has opened up in a recent interview about his history of trauma and more recent struggles with mental health. Speaking with the Alternative Press, Taylor addressed his cancellation of part of a solo tour in January of this year, as well as a raw video he posted at the time where he revealed the state he was in.
“Over the last year, I have had a complete and utter breakdown of boundaries... Mental health, ego, entitlement… culminating in a very, very real, very near relapse.”
Taylor's lyrics have always read like wounds in the act of opening; terms like raw and visceral have almost become cliche in discussion of his and his band's work. But conversations like the one he began in his car earlier this year are a reminder that sometimes those wounds take more than time to close.
In a 2017 video, Taylor addressed early childhood trauma and the lifelong wake of addiction and self-destructive behavior it left behind. Speaking with Alternative Press, the 50-year-old frontman had this to say about that interview.
“A lot of people hit me up saying it helped them get themselves back into therapy, or to try therapy for the first time,” he says. “I wish I had a better happy ending to that video than I did. I didn’t end up addressing those things until this year. A lot of my issues come from being convinced that I’m right, even when I’m wrong.”
The trauma Taylor refers to started early in life. Moved around frequently as a child, he was raped by a teen when he was just 10 years old. A teen near-overdose, and an attempted suicide as a young man after a bad breakup followed. In 2003, as a young superstar, Taylor had to be talked down from jumping off the 8th-storey balcony of an LA hotel. He quit drugs and alcohol at the insistence of his then-fiancee, building a healthy life around his family, but in the aftermath of that marriage's end, he began drinking again. Taylor became sober once more in 2010.
At the beginning of this year, however, he got to "a real dark point". As he put it
“I found that my pursuit of work and all things ego was killing me. And nearly killed me. So I’ve reinvested my life to the point [where] I’m only going to work so much. I’ll never be gone from home for more than two-and-a-half weeks. I’m putting importance back on the things I really value. That is the greatest gift I could give myself and my family.”
When Taylor was younger, he only felt he had his bandmates to open up to. “People like Clown and Joey [Jordison] knew. I talked to Paul [Gray] about it. I’m not sure anybody else [knew], to be honest.” Heartbreakingly, two of those three are gone.
Fame and fortune in the music business can start to feel like a machine that takes in young talent and spits out either dead bodies or mental health advocates. As Slipknot's Jim Root put it, “As men, we won’t seek help until we’re on that ledge.” Luckily, it's starting to look like Taylor is joining the unofficial ranks of those who have survived to become the latter.
