Slipknot’s Clown Now a Zoom User After He ‘Wouldn’t Buy Into FaceTime’

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Slipknot’s Shawn “Clown” Crahan has come around to working virtually with his bandmates when they can’t be together in person. That’s after Crahan spent several years, as he recently suggested, maintaining a willful ignorance about videoconferencing technology such as Zoom when it came to Slipknot recording sessions.

These days, though, the Slipknot co-founder, co-writer and percussionist has no problem at all collaborating over video call, despite his earlier reservations. That’s how the musician put it to Metal Hammer in a quick interview from Tuesday (June 1) about the masked metal band’s ongoing work on a studio album follow-up to 2019’s We Are Not Your Kind.

“What are you going to do when you’re the Clown and you’re stuck at home?” Crahan asked the mag. “I got busy writing. We got busy thinking and feeling. We got busy loving and taking it in.”

But “another little thing happened” during that time as well, the Slipknot figurehead continued. “Just like you and I are on Zoom right now — imagine being someone like the Clown, who wouldn’t buy into FaceTime who wouldn’t buy into technology, asking his singer, ‘Hey, send the vocals through the internet.’ But this year has been a year of Zoom and FaceTime, and do music at your house and email it and we’ll put it in the song. This has been a great year to catch up on technology and utilize it and benefit from art making.”

Crahan added that he was “able to work on music with others in the band and [lead singer] Corey [Taylor] was in Vegas and he was able to go to a studio and do vocals and send it. That’s amazing. So I took benefit of that stuff and those that never wanted to use technology are using technology, like me.”

Elsewhere among Tuesday’s interview, the musician responded in the affirmative when asked if the upcoming Slipknot effort bears any similarity to Iowa, the group’s seminal 2001 second album.

“Yes, yes,” Crahan replied before cryptically adding, “This one is a cobra in a basket. You can either know how to play the instrument, or you can take the circumstance. This is real. But you’re gonna open the basket. You’re going to play, you’re going to charm and be charmed.”

At least the rocker can do his charming via video conference now.