Revision as of 09:36, 2 September 2020

An excerpt from Youth Code singer Sara Taylor's interview with the shock-rock icon

It's 108 degrees in Los Angeles, and in Marilyn Manson's words, "the ants have come indoors." Between the hellish heat and the swarming insects, the August day is an apt reflection of the apocalyptic times, which have seen a global pandemic grip the world in turmoil. So too is Manson's recently released song "WE ARE CHAOS," the haunting lead single and title track off his imminent new album, due out September 11th via Loma Vista. "If you say that we're ill, give us your pill/Hope we'll just go away/But once you've inhaled death/Everything else is perfume," he intones, words that ring eerily relevant to the deadly airborne virus leading to COVID-19, though they were written before the rise of the contagion. "We are sick, fucked up and complicated/We are chaos, we can't be cured."

Also in L.A. is Sara Taylor, vocalist of the industrial duo Youth Code — "I want to fucking die," she says of the soaring temps. Her band released its own new single, the EBM stomper "Puzzle," back in April, just as the pandemic was really taking hold. The song could be seen as the latest culmination of a long journey kicked off back when Taylor was 10 years old and discovered Manson's debut album, Portrait of an American Family, in her dad's CD collection. Like "a fucking sleuth," she listened to the record for the first time on the sly in the middle of the night while everyone else was asleep. It "scared the living fucking shit" out of her. It also "started a fire in me that could not be put out," she wrote in an essay for Revolver in 2018, and "set the wheels in motion for who I've grown to be."

With the end times seemingly upon us, it only seemed right to bring these two very different yet deeply intertwined artists together. For her part, Taylor was excited at the chance to interview her longtime artistic hero. As for Manson, he seemed intrigued to field questions from a fellow creative instead of yet another journalist. "It's easy to succeed at dying or giving up, but it takes a lot more courage to try to excel in life and try to be better than you were the last time you did something," he offered as words of encouragement to a kindred spirit.

In the following excerpt of their conversation, the two discuss WE ARE CHAOS, Manson's collaboration with co-producer and outlaw country star Shooter Jennings, and why meeting Elton John brought the shock-rock icon to tears.

SARA TAYLOR How are you feeling about the new album? Stoked?

MARILYN MANSON I am, yes. … It's been a strange path to get to it, because Shooter Jennings and I started it essentially a year and a half ago. We were both touring, so we would work during times when we were both off. But strangely enough, WE ARE CHAOS, lyrically, and for the most part musically, was written about a year and a half ago, and the record was finished in January. We were supposed to release it sooner. [Then] the Ozzy tour that we were meant to do was canceled because he was ill, and then I was a little bit freaked out, in the sense that I was concerned about him. And then also, I had to figure out, "What am I going to do with the rest of my year?" And then the pandemic happened, so that answered the question of what am I going to do for the rest of the year.

Although the song "WE ARE CHAOS" has nothing necessarily to do with what's happening right now, it has changed from now, when you listen to it. It does feel as if it could have been written about now, but it really wasn't necessarily about anything other than maybe my own mental health, trying to relate with other people about how the world is ... Right now, it's [also about] mental health, that's also a great concern, us being kept indoors for so long can really do work at someone's emotions and their soul, and test their strength in a lot of ways.

TAYLOR Yeah. I mean, absolutely. Especially if you have a 30-year career of traveling, and doing stuff, being forced to be stuck in a house, it's a shit position.

MANSON Yeah. Yeah. That's true. [But] I wasn't even thinking of that so much, because the one benefit of being trapped indoors, for me, is that I've created my house to be a bit of a playground workplace of creativity, with having an art studio where I can paint, which is where I made the artwork for the album for the first time. I've painted artwork just for the album and not during lockdown, but before that. And then, I have a music studio, and I have my cats, and my partner in life, and I have my movies and books.

TAYLOR Yeah. Stuff to occupy you. What I wanted to ask first, outside of asking about you being excited for the record to come out, is that you've worked with so many different collaborators over the years, from Scott Putesky to Jeordie, to Tim Sköld, Tyler, Reznor — how has working with Shooter different?

MANSON Working with Shooter was different because he and I met right before I was on Sons of Anarchy, because they had asked Shooter to contact me, and we had never really officially met each other, and we were meant to do a song for the season finale of Sons of Anarchy. But we didn't really like the direction that they wanted us to go in, I suppose, at the time. So there was no hard feelings there, but instead I ended up being on the show.

The first time that we worked together was, I think, we recorded on his TASCAM 6-track, his cover of "Cat People" for his album [Countach (For Giorgio)], a tribute to Giorgio Moroder. And I liked it so much and we liked working together. And then we became really good friends, but both of us had then started touring, so it was a little difficult to find time when we could work together. But we would shift between working in his studio, my studio, another studio that could accommodate initially his entire band, which includes strings and drums and everything.

So what we did mostly, we started writing on piano and with vocals, and it seemed great for both of us to find a spot where my voice and piano sounded really different. And it seemed like I could really go places that I had not gone before. Different keys, or different rhythms, or just different elements and ideas. And sometimes while on tour, I would send him texts with pages of lyrics and things like that, [and] he would send me back music. [Or] when I'd see him a week or two later, we would sit down and he'd say, "What do you think about this?" Being inspired by the lyrics. So it was a bit of Elton John/Bernie Taupin for the beginning in a sense. I don't know, which one that makes me. Actually, it's in reverse.

And strangely, in the time period after we started doing the record, he had just won these Grammys for working with Brandi Carlile. And we went to this concert that she did that was a dedication to Joni Mitchell's Blue record. And then we got to meet Elton John and he kissed me on both cheeks.