Devin Townsend says metal was “undervalued” by the music industry thanks to “Mötley Crüe and all that s**t”
Devin Townsend has argued that bands like Mötley Crüe were the reason metal never got the credit it deserved in the industry.
In a new interview with D’Addario, Townsend opens up about the philosophies that shaped his music journey, and why he thinks the music business failed to take metal seriously.
The Canadian musician, known for his experimental approach to metal and sound design, says his fascination with music began as a way to express himself safely as a kid: “My fascination with music became more practical than anything else because I could express myself in a way that wasn’t gonna get me in trouble from my parents at least.”
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In particular, his obsession with echo and space began after hearing Judas Priest’s Victim of Changes. “I remember hearing Victim of Changes and KK Downing had the echo on the guitar,” he says. “And the thing I found so compelling about that… is echo made even the most profoundly wrong choices intentional, and it kind of forces the hand of it just by having it insistently repeat. And so Judas Priest, Motorhead, Bon Scott, that sort of era, I just loved it. And then Van Halen.”
Like many young metalheads, Townsend recalls finding belonging through the guitar.
“We’re all in the metal shop and we’d be making whammy bars and everybody passing around tablature for Eruption and everything,” he says. “There was a certain amount of social collateral that came with being able to play an instrument. I remember very specifically being in the band room in grade eight and you know, I‘m a super awkward kid and I got shit hair and like the whole works.”
“And I remember hearing these kids in the back room saying, ‘Well I think that kid out there knows how to play guitar.’So I came in and played a bunch of Judas Priest riffs and all of a sudden these dudes were like, ‘Okay, you can be our buddy now.’ And I was like, ‘That’s all you gotta do? Wow.’”
But for all his love of the genre, Townsend feels the wider industry never fully understood what metal could offer.
“Metal is a dynamic that I feel was undervalued by the music industry at large because it was tied to the aesthetic of Mötley Crüe and all that shit,” he says. “Because I was a very sensitive kid and consequently, a very sensitive adult, I do find that it’s visceral in ways that other music isn’t, and it managed to scratch an itch, but as a dynamic, as a texture.”
That sensitivity, explains Townsend, also came from his deep connection to the natural world growing up in Vancouver – a relationship that continues to shape his sound today.
“Being from Vancouver and up north there, my ability to recognise my own emotional process was tied to the weather. So if it was raining, I would be able to get a sense of what it felt like to participate in the rain through echo and suspended tonalities, you know, like a ninth or a second.”
“It always seemed to resonate with that. And also the mountains, you know, the Rocky Mountains up there. We used to go on family vacations up north, and we’d just drive for eight hours. The emotional component of the scale of that was something that, from a very young age, I felt like a compulsion to try and express, I believe.”
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