SLIPKNOT percussionist Shawn “Clown” Crahan says that plans are still afoot to put out a set of 11 previously unreleased songs recorded by four members of the band during the sessions for its 2008 LP “All Hope Is Gone”.
Crahan revealed the existence of the music in 2018, saying that he, singer Corey Taylor, guitarist Jim Root and DJ Sid Wilson wrote and laid down the more psychedelic-flavored tunes at a separate studio during an impasse in the recording of “All Hope Is Gone”.
While speaking to Terry “Beez” Bezer of Knotfest.com‘s “Mosh Talks With Beez”, Crahan stated about plans to issue the unreleased material, tentatively titled “Look Outside Your Window” (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “The reason why we never can commit to a date or anything is because — don’t make it confusing. Don’t make it something it’s not. Don’t call it something it’s not. Accept it. It’s music. It’s art. It doesn’t carry the SLIPKNOT name. Joey [Jordison, then-SLIPKNOT drummer] wasn’t up the hill playing drums. He doesn’t know anything about the songs. I think he’s only been to the house once or twice. It’s a completely different project. It was never held to piss people off. It was never held to prove a point.
“It’s been mixed. It’s been mastered. It’s ready to go,” he revealed. “We wanna put it out. But it’s only gonna be put out when the priority is created correctly. It’s up to everyone to sort of shut their mouths and not make it confusing. Don’t let it affect SLIPKNOT. That’s the priority — SLIPKNOT, SLIPKNOT, SLIPKNOT, SLIPKNOT. Everything else is just beautiful things that branch off of it. Everyone, quit confusing it. Accept it. We are an anomaly. We’re too much. We’re everything and anything at the same time and no time at all.”
When Beez pointed out to Crahan that the pandemic would have been the perfect time to release a project like “Look Outside Your Window”, Shawn said: “Well, okay, you put me in a hard position, but I think I can talk about it as an adult, ’cause I’m an adult, and everybody’s an adult, and these are facts — these are facts, and I’m gonna speak facts.
“We have never really had a tentative [release date]. We speculate. So we get a speculation. We get a date under speculation. But we don’t even really make it tentative. We just kind of throw it out there — speculate. But then someone like Corey might wanna do his solo album earlier. I love that. Let’s not get this confused. We really don’t have to go much more into it than that. I love that he wants to do his thing. I’ve got the rest of my life to do ‘Look Outside Your Window’ with him. But he may only have right now, maybe in his mind, to do what he wants to do. It’s not up to me to dictate what he may or may not want to do with his life, his career, even though we’re so together with one thing, bonded by one. We never make everything confusing; everybody else does.
“So, I will tell you that we speculated many times during the pandemic very decent dates [that would include sufficient] marketing. But remember, I have my whole life to be able to do this with him, and Jim, and for all of us…
“It was created because we wanted to create art, and we did, and it ended up being something that everybody’s gonna want, and they’re gonna get it when it’s right,” Crahan explained. “Like we should think about having babies — only do it when we know we can be good mothers and fathers, when we know we’re not gonna walk away from each other, when we know we’re gonna be there for a reward for the child and give all of ourselves. That’s the way we tried to do it, and we did — we tried to get it out.
“The reason why I’m holding out is because it’s absolutely beautiful — I’m very proud of it; I’m so proud of everybody in it — and it just needs to be represented correctly,” he added. “It needs not affect anybody negative. Nobody should be affected by it in any negative way; I won’t allow it. And if it means people are going to, it will never see the light of day. ‘Cause people make things confusing, and I won’t allow it. Because when you grow older, you become wiser.”
One of the songs from “Look Outside Your Window”, “‘Til We Die”, surfaced on the digipak of “All Hope Is Gone”, but the rest have not been made available anywhere.
In 2019, Taylor described the material on “Look Outside Your Window” to SiriusXM‘s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk” as “experimental,” “super vibey” and “super melodic.” He added: “There’s something about those songs. They’re very solemn, very energetic, very artistic. For people who are used to a certain way of SLIPKNOT sounding, this doesn’t sound anything like that. It’s much more of a rock vibe. Honestly, it’s much more of a RADIOHEAD vibe, to be honest.”
According to Taylor, the music that was recorded for “Look Outside Your Window” was originally supposed to be released simultaneously with the “All Hope Is Gone” tracks, but the plan never quite came together.
“Man, I tried like hell to make those two worlds come together — ‘All Hope Is Gone’ and ‘Look Outside Your Window’ — to the point where I was taking songs from both and kind of putting them together, like arrangement, sequencing,” Corey told “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk”. “I had two different versions of ‘All Hope Is Gone’ that I had put together with songs from that. And just honestly, because of the emotional rifts that were in the band, the turmoil that was going on, nobody wanted to try and make that work. So what we ended up with was ‘All Hope Is Gone’ and then this unreleased album, which we’ve been trying to find a way to release this for a really long time.”
Prior to the start of the pandemic, SLIPKNOT was touring in support of its latest album, “We Are Not Your Kind”, which was released in August 2019 via Roadrunner.
