Devin Townsend: “If I was given a budget of five million pounds, I would be a menace!”

It is almost a dead-cert that any fan of heavy music over the last thirty years will at least be aware of the name Devin Townsend. It is also almost certain that, given the vast array of output making up the incredible body of work the man has put out, you will be a fan of at least one era of his career.

His latest album, PowerNerd, is the newest piece of work to drop in a career spanning over three decades and thirty albums. Forming part of a series of albums, the creation of PowerNerd, wasn’t a straightforward process for Devin. Personal matters threw him a curveball during the writing process and shifted the album’s direction and his approach to dealing with grief.

In our latest Cover Story, V13 sat down with Devin to talk about PowerNerd, the challenges he faced while recording the album, and how that changed him as a person.

Let’s talk about the announcement today. The opera, what can you tell us about it? What the plan is. Where it fits into everything…

“The Moth is the second project in this four record project, PowerNerd, The Moth, Axolotl, and a project called Ruby Quaker. It’s the centerpiece to this particular period of my life and work. I’ve been working on The Moth now for a decade. As you were talking about yours, the bucket list for me has included, since I was 12 years old, making a musical. Making a rock opera type of thing.”

PowerNerd, I believe, is number 28 in the album list or in the release list?

“I think it’s more than that. I guess that depends on whether or not we include the live records, but the workload for those live records is such that I do so I think we’re in the 30s now.”

How do you feel about talking about a number like that? When you talk about your work-levels and busyness?

“I think it’s logical, and the reason why I think it’s logical is, as I’ve expressed through the years in interviews, music functions as the byproduct of my process of getting my act together as a human being. I’ve been doing this professionally for 34 years, so I’m at 30, probably 34 records, it seems appropriate because each year that goes by your identity and your connection to it, work, family and life in general is fluid.

That’s just what life is. I don’t know anybody who’s emotionally healthy who’s the same person. It just leads one to believe that if your process is about trying to articulate your life, after 30-some odd years, you’ll have 30-some odd records.”

Talking about life-changing and people growing older, growing up, emotions changing, do you listen back to some of your older records and think that I can relate that to that period of my life?

“All of them. I think that my criteria for releasing a record is not that it has to be technically perfect more did I do the best I could at the time? Is the result of that in line with how that year felt? If those two criteria are met, then I’m cool. Thus far, every record that I’ve put out, even the ones that are maybe not as strong as the others, they are still indicative of a period of my life in which maybe I wasn’t as musically inspired as I was at other times.”

“Music functions as the byproduct of my process of getting my act together as a human being.”

For somebody who is so creative, how do you deal with those kinds of lulls?

“They are still as compulsive to articulate as the moments that are creatively more interesting. The thing that I’ve recognized over the years is that my process of articulating music is a function for my mental health in a lot of ways. If I’m able to express what I’m feeling through sound, then I have the opportunity to listen to it and get a better perspective. I’m just so thick that when it comes to understanding what’s going on in my life, I don’t, but if I’m able to write it then I listen to it, I’m like, ‘Oh, okay.’

As a result of that, sometimes these periods of my life where that function is necessary have gone into making music that I’m just like, ‘Oh, God, that’s a fucking horror show.’ I remember thinking my life, during the making of Alien for example, was so full of fear and paranoia that when I sat to start to put a face to that year, what was coming out was just so ugly. I remember thinking, ‘Oh God, this is gonna be a pain in the ass.’ Not because I wasn’t connected to the music, because I was, but just because by being connected you’re so deep in that frame of mind, that you can’t kind of run from it. You have to just mine those dark corners for what it is that makes it accurate.

Conversely, there have been moments where I’ve been like, ‘Oh, thank God, this is easy. This one’s an easy one.’ Now, when I say easy, I don’t mean it on a technical level. I mean just emotionally. Maybe Snuggles, for example, or The Hummer. Even though they were more difficult on a different level to make, at least the experience of living with them is comforting as opposed to just like a soundtrack to a nervous breakdown.”

Cover Feature – Issue 067 – Devin Townsend

I read that PowerNerd’s musically was written in 11 days. Could you talk us through that 11-day process?

“Sure. To be clear, that 11-day process is more of the assimilation of ideas that I’ve collected. During that time I’ll rewrite or I’ll write a new song and during those 11 days, I found the identity of PowerNerd. The process, although much shorter than it usually was, is technically no different than the other ones. How it functions is I have my Pro Tools open throughout the day then, for as long as I can remember, I just write what I’m feeling, if anything, that day. There’s not a lot of premeditation as to where it fits in. It’s just like I’ve got an idea for a chorus, or I’ve got an idea for a riff, or I’ve got an idea for an ambient section. Whatever it is, I just do it.

I relegate those ideas to folders on my desktop, and usually it’s four different folders. One is straight ahead, like PowerNerd or Addicted or Epic Cloud or whatever. One is complicated, like The Moth or Deconstruction or Alien or Infinity or Empath. Another one is meditative, so that’s like Dream Piece, Snuggles, The Hummer, Ghost. Then another one is a wild card, things that are new to me. An example of that would have been Ziltoid, what I’m doing with Axolotl.

Then, once I get those folders populated with enough raw ideas that I feel like I can form it into something at that point, I do what I did in the 11 days for PowerNerd, which was let’s take this apart. Let’s make sessions. Let’s turn this into songs. Let’s take that one chorus and put a riff around it and make it into a song. Let’s see if this one works. Let’s eliminate certain things. Usually, that process takes between a month or two. For PowerNerd, I only did it in 11 days and I did that on purpose because what it does is, in my mind, establish parameters to work within that eliminate the tendency to overthink music that doesn’t need to be overthought like PowerNerd.”

You described yourself as, a lot of the time, overthinking your work and your music but, 11 days, I guess that doesn’t give you a lot of time to overthink. What was that experience like?

“Well, every record that I do, because I’m long in the tooth now, and I’ve been doing it for so long, I think I’m always looking for an angle that is inspiring for me. That can come in the form of, when I say a gimmick, it seems like disparaging towards it and that’s not what I mean, I just don’t know another word, but you know, like I had a Gospel choir for Epicloud. We had prog symphony for Deconstruction we had Anneke van Giersbergen for Addicted and Epicloud, so there’s always something about a record.

You find its identity in some form is established based on that one aspect of it and by finding that, it gives me more clues as to how to fill in the blanks as I’m putting together a record. For PowerNerd, I thought that in that light, a limited amount of time would be the catalyst for what I would think of as the urgency of that record to come through.”

“I remember thinking my life, during the making of Alien for example, was so full of fear and paranoia that when I sat to start to put a face to that year, what was coming out was just so ugly.”

Lyrically then PowerNerd feels like quite an emotional record. What took you down that path on this record? It also feels like PowerNerd started as one thing and shifted into something else. Was that the case?

“That’s exactly right. It was really, really fucking difficult actually. I think the best way to summarize what ended up happening with PowerNerd was it started as a fun simple party record that again, extended an olive branch to the audience so tolerant of some of the weirdness that I’ve done over the past few years, like Puzzle or Empath and then, in hope that when I release the next parts of this project, if you want to look at it that way, the fact that PowerNerd was simple, people would be like, ‘Okay, well at least we have some of that.’ But then, from the minute I started working on it, just shit in my personal life, and in the life of my family just went fucking tits up.

I had already committed to the timeline, and trying to process grief while writing something that was so, it’s a party record in a sense, made it so that the whole nature of PowerNerd is almost like a contradiction. You’ve got these straight-ahead arrangements that were meant to be easy, but then it was juxtaposed by an emotional response to a time when that was unavoidable. You can’t ignore loss and grief and things like this. In the past, probably I did, which made this experience even harder because there was all this unprocessed shit that as soon as there’s a crack in the veneer, it all starts coming out.

Trying to remain with some degree of equilibrium, during the process of making a record on my own in a lot of ways, although I did have help, the lion’s share of the work I was still doing on my own in a new studio that I was not familiar with and all these things that were compounding the grief of the family and all these things that you’re trying to be present for, I felt that, at certain points during the making a PowerNerd, we just weren’t going to be able to deliver it.

I thought that the nature of everything that was going on was just so insurmountable at that time that I was just gonna have to put it aside but I also have a bottom line. I’m a DIY musician playing music about coffee-drinking aliens. I gotta make sure that we keep the bottom line going, so I dug into it and, with help, I worked through the record and delivered it. If there’s anything that’s a definition of the term PowerNerd.”

You’ve been writing albums for 30+ year now. Around the emotion and the loss which you went through in your personal life, has life ever thrown you a curve ball like that before or right in the middle of writing an album?

“Not in that way, no, never. Not only that, I think if it had in the past, which it may have, I don’t think I was emotionally developed enough to process it in the same ways that I did this time. I think that as difficult of a process as it was, it yielded huge benefits for me because there’s a certain point with grief where you have no choice but to surrender to it, you can’t repress it anymore.

Through that process of recognizing that, not only is that essential because you have to process it or else it’s like a backpack you carry around, but also recognizing that maybe my fear of dealing with those things in the past had been unfounded. Once I was in it there was a real tangible sense of, ‘Oh, this is a human experience.’”

“I felt that, at certain points during the making a PowerNerd, we just weren’t going to be able to deliver it.”

What did you learn about yourself, both as an artist writing music and as a person?

“I learned a couple of things. I hadn’t been meeting myself where I was as a soul, as a person. I think that, on some level, when you’re in a vacuum and everything’s all right, it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re more balanced than you are, more reasonable than you are, or more intelligent than you are and able to handle things. But when shit goes sideways you recognize where you’re actually at and I realize that I wasn’t as balanced as I thought I was.

I’m balanced but I had thought that I was more zen than I am. I also realized how much anger was still in there and how much fear was still in there and then I recognized, as a musician, how my need to keep people happy, and people pleasing, is also a trauma response in a lot of ways.

To make the step to not engage in those patterns that no longer serve us is a leap of faith that, not only had I maybe assumed, I wasn’t able to do that, but it turned out I was. There was also a real fear that everything was going to fall apart if you just followed what it is that you are as opposed to, what it is that you’ve created an identity, for yourself. Again, life didn’t offer any options so you just had to follow those things and now I’m slowly starting to recognize that, in the long run, as difficult as those transitions and those facings of long-held beliefs or fears can be, it’s the healthiest thing one can do for oneself.”

Do you think that’ll change going forward, looking at maybe not necessarily this four-album kind of cycle, but the way you approach writing albums or using music and, if so, in what way?

“Yeah. So much of my sense of personal identity has been invested in my work for as long as I can remember and as much as I beak off about it not being the case, maybe one of the things that I recognize through PowerNerd is that it is the case. You can tell yourself whatever it is you want to believe, but the person you’re deceiving ultimately is yourself. Recognizing where you are is important for growth. It’s essential for growth.

I recognize that because so much of my self-worth was tied into the work, and still is, it prevented me from stopping. It prevented me from slowing down and seeing how fortunate I am for the things that I have right now. I was always wanting to be where I was going, it was always this perpetual sense of being in the future in my creative process because of the frantic nature of it for so many years.

Moving forward, I recognize through this that it is no longer healthy for me but it’s not like it changes overnight, and I think this is a lot of the reason why I struggle with some of the self-help avenues that we get fed. ‘It’s as simple as doing this. Be in a moment and you’re fine,’ It seems so reductive, right? The most tangible way for me to learn these lessons is through direct experience and the experience of my limits which I participated in very tangibly during this and moving forward. I recognize that just can’t continue in the same way.”

Devin Townsend ‘PowerNerd’ Album Artwork

When you look back at your career and your life, do you see it from a different perspective?

“Not really. I don’t think about the past that often at all which makes writing autobiographies or doing photo books like tearing your fingernails out. I don’t even pay attention to the events. I pay attention to completion. That’s always been the process. After this, it doesn’t change how I see the past because I still don’t think about it.”

What about the future? You’ve talked about the four albums and we’ve talked about how you were thrown a curve ball through during writing PowerNerd, has that affected the narrative for the next set of records in any way?

“The narrative for the entirety of the project was established by The Moth. We use the analogy of a caterpillar into a moth to represent some sort of a narrative-like transformation. That transformation could be on a personal level, psychologically, physically, you get older, whatever. More pointedly, it’s about death. It’s about the transformation from one state to the next. When I say state, I’m not making any assertions about what happens after death, because anybody who does is full of shit, in my opinion.

Well, maybe not full of shit, but, with that, what I’m more trying to put across is that idea of transformation from one state to another, life to death, or youth to age, or whatever. That is the overarching theme of each one of these records and the project as a whole. The idea is to use each one of these aesthetics, PowerNerd, Moth, Axolotl, and Ruby Quaker, to give a different vantage point of the same theme.”

“The narrative for the entirety of the project was established by The Moth. We use the analogy of a caterpillar into a moth to represent some sort of a narrative-like transformation.”

Do you think that each album will appeal to a different core of your fan base?

“Oh yeah. PowerNerd, it’s an easy one. It’s all choruses and heavy riffs and shrieking and all that sort of stuff. That’s nothing new for me. It’s got a different different angle and it’s coming from a different vantage point and based on different experiences but that’s not reinventing the wheel at all. Moth is very different for me, very new, very over the top, very extreme, very heavy, very dark, and very complicated. It’s somewhere between Jesus Christ Superstar and super heavy death black metal shit. It’s very different.

Axolotl, the intention I’ve got for that it’s as if we go to another planet, and, on that planet are these crazy creatures, and what would pop songs sound like on a planet full of life that we have no perspective on how they function? It’s super strange, alien, fucked-up music. Really fucked up music. One of the most fucked up things I’ve ever done.

Then Ruby Quaker is this YouTube show that I built this spaceship for. We travel through the universe playing music and that acts as a weekly or monthly narrative describing the process. Then, in the end, we release that as basically four hours worth of improv, meditative, strange jams that summarize the whole process, but they’re all based on the same idea of change and transcendence.”

You showed your diversity through a very intense Bloodstock headline show. Where do you see this visually then?

“It depends on finances because if I had huge amounts of resources I’d be a menace but I don’t. A lot of times the things that we’ve pulled off be at the Royal Albert shows, The Retinal Circus, Bloodstock, it was all done on such a shoestring budget. I’ve had people say, ‘Some of these things come across like a High School musical.’ I say, ‘That’s because we’ve got less budget than a high school musical.’

Taking it to the stage is such a singular part of the process that it requires me to think about it to the exclusion of everything else and I’m not there yet. I will say that aside it entirely depends on budget. If we got five grand to pull a show off we’ll probably have somebody in a monkey outfit, if we’ve got five million, which we don’t have, I’d be a fucking menace.”

Could you just define PowerNerd in one sentence…

“PowerNerd is people who do the right thing even when everything else in their being and their life is in opposition to that happening. They’re not giving up and they’re doing the things that they’re supposed to do… PowerNerd…”