The iconic Slipknot percussionist, Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan, had a new interview with Michael Pementel of Heavy Consequence and revealed the backstory of the “Spiders” on Slipknot’s latest album, We Are Not Your Kind.
Here is what Clown wrote:
“Well, art is subjective, right? So everything we do comes from the heart. So ‘Spiders’ for example, you’re absolutely right, there’s never been a tune by us that is even close to that song.
Ironically enough, though, that song is in sevens. So people are going to hear it and they are gonna go, ‘Oh this is like a rock song, it’s so different for Slipknot.’ The song is in sevens, that’s out of here; it’s already twisted and turned on its back.
It’s not 4/4, it’s not [AC/DC’s] ‘TNT.’ There’s a famous quote we always say – it’s easy to make something sound crazy, but it’s so hard and almost impossible to make something crazy sound easy.
When you listen to ‘Spiders,’ you initially may begin it [and are] on it, but then try and figure it out. See if you can figure out when it starts and stops, comes and goes [in different] places.
If we write [a song] and we love it, we continue it. You got to remember there were, like, 22 songs and 26 art pieces written for this album, so all kinds of songs went away … ‘Spiders’ could have easily gone to the wayside with the other how many ever songs, but it didn’t, it kept going.”
Clown said honestly that he doesn’t even care about anyone’s thoughts besides Slipknot fans.
He continued:
“I’ve always believed our fans love us so much because we make ourselves happy first; I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks in this world, never have and never will, I live my life. That’s why you have a song like ‘Spiders.’
I believe our fans will embrace it because they really expect us to stand tall in what we believe; in a world that is wishy-washy, in a world of music that people go for fame or ego or whatever.
I’m not worried about people going, ‘Are they still a metal band?’, that’s all stupid talk. It’s all shit we get caught up into, it’s all brainwashed formulas. I’m here to be me.
We’ve prided ourselves in the fact of how many genres we fall into; we got weird, thrash, elements of black and death metal, we got this and that. It’s interesting as you get older to try different things. We don’t go out to do these things.
I guess all [I’m trying to say] is that we don’t say, ‘Hey, lets deliberately make something different.’ We just don’t do that. We wait for what inspires and then we get it.”