Interview:2020/09/01 Marilyn Manson on 'Chaos,' Collaboration, How Elton John Made Him Cry

Marilyn Manson on 'Chaos,' Collaboration, How Elton John Made Him Cry
Interview with Marilyn Manson
Date	September 1, 2020
Source	Revolver
Interviewer	Sara Taylor text: Revolver Staff

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."