Perth Music

Having released 6 studio albums and selling over 25 million albums worldwide, the band many consider the founders of Nu-Metal, Korn came upon a few stumbling blocks. Their 11 year/6 album contract with Sony Records had finished and guitarist Brian “Head” Welch decided that he had “…chosen the Lord Jesus Christ as his savior, and would be dedicating his musical pursuits to that end”. To overcome all of this the band decided to do something unheard of in the music industry - They signed a $25 million contract with EMI Music in exchange for a share in profits of their next two albums, including tours and merchandising. In the middle of their world tour to promote their new album “See You On The Other Side“, guitarist James “Munky” Shaffer gave Justin Middleton this exclusive interview.

I asked Munky if, after 11 years, recording albums was getting easier or harder. “Well, it is definitely still a challenge to create something new and exciting. The creating bit is difficult, the recording bit is easier. We love trying something new and that is why we signed the partnership with EMI. It has given us freedom to do what we want and know that our record company has complete faith in us. In the past record companies would give bands money to create an album and if they didn’t make money from that then that would be it. We hope that with deals like the one we have with EMI it can create a model that other artists can look at and consider. It is a partnership where both parties can profit.”

With music that is so intense and full of sound it was a big shock to the band that guitarist “Head” decided to leave and a challenge to the recording process. “Well when Head left and I became the only guitarist for the band, it put a lot of responsibility on me as a musician. I had to come up with a way of creating Korn music with one guitar instead of two. It was very daunting at first and when we started recording I was only thinking of creating songs with one guitar due to playing them live. After I realised that when we tour and need to play our older songs we would have to have a touring guitarist, it made it much easier. I allowed myself to create different guitar tracks for songs and they sounded great.”

“When creating new songs for the album we tried a different strategy than usual. I started with a drum loop in the studio and just played until I found a fitting riff. We then used that riff to create the songs verse and chorus which then produced the melody of the song. ‘Fieldy’ then layed down the basslines, Dave (Silveria) went over the drum loop with proper drums and Jonathan (Davis) put lyrics in last. Usually we create the songs with a more live process. This new way was harder for me but let everyone in the band be a lot more creative.”

Korn’s current world tour includes North America, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and then North America again. Along with all this Korn have decided that the rock festival they created - The Family Values Tour - will be coming back this year. “We’ll be doing that tour again along with The Deftones, Stone Sour, Flyleaf and Dir En Grey. This time we’re gonna have a second stage which will have different stuff on it - maybe some Hip Hop or something.” I asked Munky whether The Family Values Tour will ever make it down to Australia: “I’d love to see it come here but there is so much overhead in a tour like this that I can’t see it happening in the near future.”

On a personal note I asked Munky what he has coming up in the near future. “When we get to Europe in a few weeks I hope to start recording some stuff for a solo album. It has been brewing up for a while now and I usually bring a small recording rig on tour so I’ll probably do some recording then. It’ll most probably be an instrumental album, a little experimental and I still don’t really know how it will come out. It could be just 3 fifteen minute songs or a whole bunch of different sounding songs.”

Interview by Justin Middleton

Korn’s new album “See You On The Other Side” is out now through EMI, with the second single “Coming Undone” out now with 2 exclusive B-Sides. For more info visit Korn on EMI Australia or Korn’s official site.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Interviews, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.