EL PASO -- With a new Korn album in the works, his first solo album in progress and at least three months of touring ahead, broken up by the occasional DJ set, well, you'd think it's enough to make singer Jonathan Davis feel like a freak on a leash.
Hardly. More like a pig in mud.
The tour that brings the boys from Bakersfield, Calif. -- singer Davis, guitarist James "Munky" Shaffer and bassist and newly minted book author Reginald "Fieldy" Arvizu -- back to El Paso on Monday at the County Coliseum is a rare one for Korn, which doesn't have a new album to push.
Instead, it has a new one to make, a Korn album that will cook slowly, not pop suddenly.
They're working with Ross Robinson, who produced the band's first two albums in the mid-1990s, pivotal records that helped define an emergent, more aggressive kind of heavy rock called nu metal. The band's hoping to return to its old-school nu metal sound on this one.
Robinson's been holing up with the band in a tiny isolation booth in a Hollywood recording studio.
"We want it to be really raw, in-your-face, ruthless, like it was back in the day," Davis said by phone recently. "We're going to record it on 24-track tape, with an old analog board, no automation, nothing. Old school, like the first one. No Pro Tools editing or any of that. We want to get real band tempos that fluctuate."
Certainly Korn's been in a state of flux, on and off stage, in recent years.
Founding drummer David Silveria drifted away from the band after it went on break in 2006 (he's been replaced by Ray Luzier, a member of their touring band), following the departure of another founding member, guitarist Brian Welch, who found religion.
Fieldy detoxed, got married and wrote a book about his life with Korn, "Got the Life: My Journey of Addiction, Faith, Recovery and Korn," just published earlier this month.
Munky started his own label and released a solo album.
Davis decided to go on a solo tour last year, assembling a band that included violinist L. Shankar, who has backed Peter Gabriel. Davis usually performed seated, mixing Korn songs with the ones he wrote for the "Queen of the Damned" soundtrack in 2002.
"I'm working on a concept album, I can tell you that much. It's about what's going on with the human race and everything about control and belief systems. All kinds of (stuff)," he said of the project, for which he's written about 25 songs. "It's not totally organized yet, but it ties me into something very deep. I've got deep scars, so because of that it's very emotional."
Davis has made a career of purging those demons, but has put some of his more self-destructive tendencies behind him. He seems more intent on being a workaholic these days.
In addition to the solo album, which he said will sound like "heavy Peter Gabrielesque world music," he's gone back to performing occasional DJ sets while on tour.
"I'm having a blast. I'm having so much fun spinning music," he said, returning to something he used to do as a downtrodden high-school student in Bakersfield, where the group started in 1993. Davis has been posting some of his DJ sets on
www.jdsfa.com, the site he uses for his solo work with his group SFA.
He's set no timetable for the solo album, nor are he and his bandmates rushing what will be Korn's ninth studio album. They don't even have a formal label deal at the moment, Davis noted.
All this activity in and out of the band seems to have re-energized them. Their fearless leader thinks the planned return to their roots just makes sense.
"It just seems it has come full circle. We're 15 years deep and we've experimented and experimented and experimented," he said, laughing at the different directions the group's taken over the years.
But without pressure to come up with the next big single, Davis thinks the band is free to create what it wants and worry about selling it later.
"This is the longest time we've ever taken off, ever -- 10 months," he said of the gap between this touring cycle and the last one. "I don't want to rush this thing. I want it to evolve and become what it needs to become."
That same lack of pressure should make shows like the one they'll play in El Paso -- where the group has performed more than a half-dozen times -- a little freer than normal.
Plus, the members all have other, more important priorities in their lives.
"After the El Paso show I have to get on a plane and go home," Davis said. "It's my son's birthday the next morning. He's going to be 2."
http://www.elpasotimes.com/entertainment/ci_12213070
Analog equipment??! That's how they should've recorded Take a Look in the Mirror. I'm very excited to hear this. The interviewer made a mistake on Munky's solo album; it has yet to be released. They also forgot to mention the covers album.
My fifth Korn concert is on May 10th.
