Canadian genius Devin Townsend’s new album PowerNerd was meant to be a quickly-made, light-hearted reflection on his rock’n’roll-loving teen years. In the event, he explains, it ended up being a more poignant document of grief, resilience and gratitude…
"This is my new studio, do you like it?"
At a computer terminal by a mixing desk, Devin Townsend is showing Kerrang! his box-fresh recording bunker. It's very nice, very ordered, very Devy. We're talking to the Canadian legend today about his new album, PowerNerd – "Like, my 500th record" – the first fruit of his new digs.
Having spent almost two decades at his last place, Devin decided to break it in by setting a purposefully short window for himself to make PowerNerd, 11 days. A hard enough task, almost impossible when you're having to dial in a very expensive studio on the fly, and being in charge of both room and band.
"My last place was just a garage, and it sounded awful in there, but I knew how to use it, right?" he laughs. "All of a sudden I get into a new room, and I had to figure it out. And it took me a while. I'm starting to get it now, but PowerNerd was trial by fire, not only for the production, but for every aspect of the record."
This would turn out to be much more than just a herculean workload. During recording, real life outside music presented the worst possible news. What was meant to be in part a reflective celebration of youth and rock’n’roll suddenly took on a far heavier weight as its creator navigated sudden, unexpected grief.
PowerNerd, then, is a testament to not being sucked under even by life's biggest waves, but to learn from them and, as the man says today, "feel immense gratitude for what I'm fortunate enough to have."
Here, he tells Kerrang! about it all, and how it proves that "music is just a byproduct of picking my way through life…"
You set yourself a purposefully short time to record PowerNerd. How come?
“To a degree. I set a limited time for me to assemble it, because the writing process is always sort of consistent in that I just write every day, whenever I feel compelled to. And then once I finish that nugget of an idea, I'll relegate it to certain categories: this is a heavy idea, this is an orchestral idea, this is a mellow one, this is straight-ahead one. For as long as I've been doing this, that's been the process. But then once they've been populated with enough material, I take those folders and compile it and try to turn it into an album, aesthetically or thematically. That's what took 11 days on PowerNerd. It's significantly shorter than that process usually is. I did that to try to give myself some boundaries that, by working within them, limited the options, and therefore, hopefully, I don't overthink it in the way that I typically do. And it kind of worked – I only over-thought it a bit!”
Do you tend to be a picker, constantly fiddling with ideas and parts forever until they’re taken off you?
“Oh yeah. And it's not just music. The diagnosis that people sort of bandy about in terms of people's tendencies can be deceiving, right? Because I'm not obsessive-compulsive, yet I have a lot of tendencies that sort of tick those boxes. Like, in the room, wherever I am, I want things to be symmetrical. If something's two degrees to the left, I want completely centered. But I guess the distinction between that and true OCD is, if I have to, I can let it go, but I prefer not to. And I'm like that with music, to a very anal degree.”
Was it nice to go in knowing you were being more impulsive and had to let things go quite quickly?
“Well, in theory, it was nice. But as life tends to have a tendency to do, the things that become problematic on a personal level appear without any warning. Concurrent with that idea of putting parameters on the writing of PowerNerd, my family and I went through a lot of heavy shit at the exact same time. So what had originally served as eliminating options so I could be more streamlined with the process ended up almost as the opposite, and all of a sudden I had no time to do anything. I think the benefit is it creates a sense of urgency that wouldn't have been there had I had a reasonable amount of time to do it. But again, best laid plans… I had no anticipation of my life on a personal level exploding during the period of writing, but it did. So, did it help? In some ways, it helped. Did it hinder? In some ways it hindered.
“But I do think that a deadline is often my best friend, because my tendency to just keep picking at it is such that unless I've got a date that I that I'm aiming towards for delivery, I would just pick at things indefinitely.”
Does putting those limitations on yourself become creative, knowing you have to make a decision?
“Every record, I try to identify some sort of novelty in the writing process that makes it inspiring. So that could be working with a gospel choir for Epicloud, for example, or I work with a certain drummer for a thing, or work with an orchestra or a different singer. So I'm always trying to find an angle to approach the writing from that I haven't done before. After so many records, that becomes very useful. Otherwise, it's like Groundhog Day, and I think that something as simple as imposing parameters on music that way, from the inception, is an example of something that's novel, that inspires me.”
There’s a couple of bits on there that have to be really direct nods to your influences. There’s a total Van Halen guitar lick that can’t have been by accident…
“I know the part you're talking about! The part that sounds like [VH belter] Jamie's Crying, right? PowerNerd is the first of four records that are connected to a theme, just like I did with Devin Townsend Project back in 2010. This one, from the beginning, I was viewing it as having reference points to my teen years. I loved dirt bikes and Motörhead and AC/DC and Def Leppard and Van Halen, and in a sense it was an homage to that in the beginning. But then, as again, these things are wont to do, by the time I got into it, I recognised that by referencing your teen years, you also start reflecting on your teen years, and it opened up a lot of cans of worms that I didn't know were there. So the guitar things that you speak of were definitely intentional.”
What’s the bigger concept behind it all, then?
“I had thought that some of these other records that I'm working on that follow this are so bloody complicated and sort of strange, that if we extend an olive branch to the audience by doing something that references things that I've done in the past, it would be simple and fun and straightforward – kind of a party record. But again, because when we were working on it, I was going through a bunch of shit with the family, loss of friends and loved ones, the record changed its theme entirely. It ended up being, I think, a way to process loss, grief and death, and things like this. I took those existing songs and then started to alter the lyrics and started to alter the intent so that it could act as a cathartic way for me to work through the process of grief. It's not a popular topic to adhere to simple party music. But I had no choice in the matter, because the original lyrics for it just seems so stupid in light of what had happened. I just sort of sunk into it, and I wrote what I felt about losing somebody.
“The record ended up being, in a very practical and tangible way, a mirror to a moment of depression that I've never actually experienced before. I've never gone through it to the extent that I went through it during the writing and the recording of this. And if anything defines the term PowerNerd, it’s that it got delivered, against all odds. I don't know if you've gone through those moments where you're just so levelled by the things that happen in your life that you think I can't do the work, where you go, ‘I can't finish this. I can't wrap my head around music or the value of it, I don’t understand what I’m hearing.’ But working through that process, the songs ended up mirroring the stages of it. You have the mission statement with the first song saying we're going to get through this. But then it sort of goes back to referencing my relationships in the past. And then in the song Glacier, it expresses a moment of like, ‘Okay, this is about death. This song is about losing somebody.’ And then the song Goodbye that follows, it is about acceptance of that.
“I've never actually sunk into grief in the ways that we were forced to, I guess. It was originally going to end with the song Goodbye, but I realised that as I've gotten older and post-pandemic, so much of the prerogative of the artists is to make the choice as to how you want records to end, how you want to leave people, and I didn't want to leave it on the note of just being devastated. The process of grief and getting through this sort of depression also includes the fact that these things don't last forever. There is another day ahead of you. So I ended the album with the song Ruby Quaker, which is a song about coffee, because I realised it was art imitating life. I had a friend come over one day, and he was like, ‘Man, you look fucking ruined. We should have a cup of coffee.’ There was a real sense in that moment of the tenacity to get through these moments, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Ultimately, PowerNerd ended up being a representation of that process unexpectedly, because at first it was supposed to be about, you know, rock’n’roll and Motörhead or whatever.”
How do you feel listening to it now that there’s a bit of distance, and you’re not having to go through the process of making an album and deal with real life, and there’s been time to unknot things a bit?
“Well, I haven't had a chance to decompress. There's been no time yet to stop and just sit. However, I do recognise that we're on the mend. I got some help, which is something that I think a lot of times people also struggle with. I know that I do as well, because you think you're admitting weakness on some level. But I also recognise, as a result of this process, how many people depend on us for our strength to remain balanced. Whether it's your parents, kids, coworkers, friends or bandmates, the responsibilities that I have taken on in life require me to recognise when my mental health is no longer benefiting any of that. Taking those steps is important. I think the thing that I'll draw from this period is that it’s possible to work through a process that you don't feel you can get through. There’s a gratitude that I feel for the people around me that helped me in those moments. PowerNerd became a testament to that in a completely unexpected way.
“Having the presence of mind to be able to look around at how fortunate we actually are, even amidst the chaos and the depression, was invaluable. Even the song Gratitude, it's not meant to be ironic. It's not meant to be a printed-out slogan that you'd see in somebody's kitchen. It's a legitimate reflection on, ‘Yes, this is difficult, but the profundity of how incredible it is to be alive and to be in this time in history is important.’ Keeping aware of how fortunate we are is part and parcel of moving forward.”
You’re always moving forward. This is your 22nd record, and you’ve already got the rest of this series planned out. What is it that keeps you going back into the studio, time after time?
“The act of creating is more important than the outcome. And for some reason, potentially the stiff-upper-lip upbringing, emotions were kind of deemed to be uncouth. As somebody who is quite sensitive and emotional by nature, I found that music became a convenient loophole for articulating things that I didn't have the vocabulary for in other ways. As a result, everything kind of got hardwired to it. So music acts as a byproduct of the process of just being a human. As such, I've been doing it for 30-odd years. It makes sense that each year has a specific aesthetic and a specific frame of mind that comes along with it. And I would say that's the same with everybody. If there's a pandemic, or if there's a loss, or if there's a success, or if there's a malady, whatever it is, it changes your your psychology. Having kids, kids moving out, whatever… music is just an inevitable byproduct of me having to kind of contend with life. That's the same reason why, when people ask me to do things from the past, I think, ‘But that doesn't factor into the process.’ Had there not been lockdown, for example, I would have not written [2022 album] Lightwork. I wouldn't have written [1997 Strapping Young Lad rager] City, had I not been in Steve Vai’s band, or what have you. My criteria for a record being worth releasing is whether or not it accurately represents a particular period of my life. The reason why I'm compelled to do that is it just seems to help, it seems to help me make sense of things that are confusing.”
And for this series of records, what’s next?
“The next one is an opera. We're doing it with the orchestra and choir, and it's dark and chaotic and heavy and thematically very somber. Then I've got this record called Axolotl, which is basically... if an abstract alien life form that was the personification of machine learning wrote pop songs. That’s the commercial one. And then I've got one that's just meditational. In a lot of ways, it seems like anytime there's a period of my life that is rife with change, it seems to manifest as four different corners. Same thing happened when we had kids. So in a sense, this is the same thing, because this period of change is as significant in many ways as that one. It's just 17 years later.”
PowerNerd is out now via Inside Out. Devin Townsend is on tour in the UK this week.
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