Devin Townsend has earned a legion of fans over his many bands and solo projects over his twenty-five year plus career. He has as many releases as years in the business, and they are all manifestations of the energy that drive him creatively for a time. For nearly a decade he has poured his work into The Devin Townsend Project. Their new album Transcendence is out today from InsideOut Music, and marks yet another era in the life and work of “Hevy Devy”.

 

We started out by asking Devin how things were going in his world, understandably busy ramping up to the release of the new album:

My world is busy, but relatively organized and if it isn’t organized, the parts that aren’t are getting organized, and it’s hard at first, but it feels very satisfying.

Close followers of Devy’s career will note that he has been on a non-stop cycle of creating, recording touring heavily all over the world, with these huge keystone performances and DVD productions too. Luckily Devin has his life in a grounded place personally where the other things that matter besides music and the music business, like family take precedence.

I certainly make time for it. I’ve been going on tour for basically my whole career, so 25 years, by ts only been since we switched management companies where I checked it, which is I guess is the most physical, 7 or 8 years ago. Since that time it’s been full on man. To be fair we’ve gained a lot of momentum and I’ve gained a lot momentum personally. I think that based on what this that I’ve chosen to do where the focus is just in our honesty being the forefront of whatever we do, like I do it because I want to, to summarize that. There’s really not a lot of option I have but to keep going , otherwise everybody is on salary and there’s a lot of things that quickly fall apart in today’s economy when it comes to music. With that being said, I go on vacation and I wake up as slow as I can. I like to make breakfast. I like to just sit outside and drink coffee, and even though there is not a ton of time off, the time off I do get, I certainly make it count.

Family and a personal life are so important to keep that balance happening artistically, right?

It’s a challenge man. At the end of it, the thing that tends to get sacrificed more than anything else is sleep, which isn’t particularly healthy, but I’m working on that to be fair. It’s not as simple as well go to sleep. It’s insomnia comes with this whole thing, but again, small steps man.

 

We next asked about the creative process for the new album where Devin still wrote the majority of the music, but allowed his band more creative input since Z2 and Blue Sky were made.

Technically, Transcendence is written like all the other records. The band and I collaborated musically on the song ‘Failure’, which I’m sure you’ve heard, but the rest of it isn’t that similar in terms of the writing process, or any of the other stuff which it was. What’s significantly different was the technical style of coming up with the idea. I would take all of my ideas and my things, and I would dictate to the members of the band what I wanted them to do, where I wanted them to do it, what I wanted with a,ll this stuff, and to be fair, when the band started, it was not like out if the blue. It was supposed to be a collaborative band. It’s supposed to be a bunch of dudes that I hired to play my back catalog. You spend 10 years with people and then work through problems, ups and downs and everything. i think up to that point, unless you’re a person who truly believes that every idea you have is of utmost brilliance, then you have to change. What I did this time is I wrote a ton of songs and then I presented a ton of them to the band, and we went through them all basically. The one that we felt suited us and the five individual personalities of the band the best, we chose to focus on. From there, we took apart each song. For the first time ever, I recognized as well that my way of thinking is in a lot of ways significantly different from at least how these guys think of music. Once I brought it into a different frame of mind, I could articulate the way I was writing things in a way they could understand. Their ten years with me allowed them to intemperate all the riffs and everything in their own way in ways that were perfect for the band. They always knew what’s new. It wasn’t at the beginning when it’s like “oh I should wait for this and not so that because it’s complicated”. We’ve done the thing for ten years. “Okay lets do that.”

 

Trust is a huge factor in working with collaborators, especially when he has been a solo enterprise for so long as a creative force.

Totally and not only that. It’s an album for me that was oddly humiliating just because I’ve managed to set myself up career and band and music wise as the lone wolf kind of thing, where I do my thing and no one messes up my sh*t. And left unchecked, you really get to the point where there are a bunch of decisions that I make that even the guys in the band were like “I don’t like that. I didn’t think that was a cool song. I didn’t think that was a good idea”. I didn’t think this was a bad thing, but because it wasn’t open for discussion at that point, it wasn’t ever dealt with. Once we started putting things together and once I actively soliciting things and ideas, I realized “holy f*ck man, I’ve done some stupid sh*t.” Like personally, musically and all this other stuff. It’s very huge for a band leader to try to get caught up on an ego trip where you’re like I’m the only one whose got his sh*t together and everybody else just gets to wave around their little finger, right? Through this process, I’ve realized that I’m just like the rest of the guys. There’s ups and downs, my quirks and quibbles, and when I get in an awkward mood which happens more than I’d like to admit. For them to be around and to work with, it took a lot of personal training for all of us in a way that was above and beyond what the music was, whatever the process was. I remember back when we collaborated on a song. We had engineers working on the song, and others working on the music. All that technical stuff was good but beneath that was a lot of growth that I think needed to happen. It was challenging.

 

The mark of a real artist is the ability to self edit. The ego can only get you so far, but when an artist loses the ability to self edit, that’s their downfall because they can’t see quality versus non quality.

I totally agree with that and it’s funny. I think that the thing is that I’ve always given myself the benefit of the doubt. I still have the ability to do that, but it’s opening yourself up to the ability that other people’s ideas can contribute to whatever you are trying to say. I’m like wow, I really need help here when it comes to self editing. I really need help when it comes to mixing. I really need help when it comes to tons of stuff. I think for whatever reason I’ve been under this impression that I’m like “I don’t need help. I’m good. I don’t need help. I can handle everything. I can do it all myself.” To a certain extent for years I have done it myself, but it all begins to suffer. It’s always the same things, family, friends, music, production, mix, blending gears, and all this sh*t that happens. Yes I can kind of do everything, but it all gets done at 50 or 60%, and I’m shot all the time. By doing it in a different way where you have people and delegate certain responsibilities, everything gets done at a higher degree. Again, with the music aside, just business wise, my own personal mental health, it’s just more got done better and more was chill, right?

One thing I wanted to throw in at the end of that, one thing about reading all these interviews is that it seems to come across for me, because they all come out at the same time that they make a huge deal out of it (collaborating more). Hey, I let people in. I’m sharing . I’m a remarkable person for letting these people see the sh*t happen. I really want to make a point that it’s not a remarkable thing, and I think that’s why it was such a sense of humiliation too as well because I’m like oh f*ck, that’s what you should be doing. This isn’t like rocket science man. It’s like you were trying to do it all yourself for reasons that hopefully, this is indicative of moving away from.

KEITH CHACHKES

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