Kyle McGinn of DeadRhetoric.com recently conducted an interview with Canadian multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter and producer Devin Townsend. A few excerpts from the chat follow below.
DeadRhetoric.com: I saw somewhere you had finished the outline for your symphony project. What is your vision for this project?
Townsend: I’ve been told I shouldn’t start thinking about it until December [2016], but between you and me and whoever is reading this, I’ve got so much of it written already. I haven’t taken the step of allowing it to become an actual form, but there’s certainly a trajectory and an aesthetic and a theme. There is an objective in terms of what it is that I want people to feel once the music on the album is finished. So you put all those things together and currently in my mind, I call it “The Moth“. It’s this big, desperate jumble of information so far. If someone told me tomorrow to start thinking about it, I’d have a much clearer answer about it, but currently it’s just a bag of stuff.
DeadRhetoric.com: I know you are constantly busy with things. You have a book coming on the way too. How much progress has been made at this point?
Devin Townsend: Oh, it’s done. Here’s another way to look at it. Typically when I do interviews with people, one of the things I hear a lot is that I’m constantly busy and going, going, and going, but really I just think I’m efficient. I have a lot of time when I don’t do anything! I go for a walk, or go get ice cream, or go do yoga. I take weekends off. I’m not balls to the wall. When it’s time for me to work, then I’m balls to the wall. But deadlines are good for me, and I think my process after 25 years is pretty efficient. I can get a lot of stuff done in very little time if I put my mind to it. If you look at my work as being a 9-to-5 job, where I start working at 9 and quit at 5, I get stuff done every day and it just sort of builds up [over time]. Doing the book, for example, maybe I spend three hours a day on it and then over the course of six months, it’s done! It’s not like I’m beating my head against the wall 15 hours a day trying to get this thing done. I just do little bits at a time and eventually it’s done. I do the same thing with all these projects. We were just talking about the symphony. By the time it comes for me to really get started in December, that’s like a year from now! I’ve already got most of it written in my mind, so when that time comes… I’ve already started the artwork now, for example. I know where I’m going to record it, I know who is going to produce it, I know which symphony I am going to use, I know I’m going to mix it — all these things are kind of done and I’m working on other projects now. So when I finally do get to the symphony, the amount of effort that will go into actualizing it is basically going to be delegating tasks to people and overseeing it in a lot of ways. So the appearance may be that I’m cooking things up 15 hours a day in some science lab, but the reality is that I’m going to the mall to go Christmas shopping tonight. [Laughs]
Read the entire interview at DeadRhetoric.com.
(via Blabbermouth)
