“EVERYDAY IS A GIFT!” – Devin Townsend – 2024
For nearly three decades now I have listened to, written about, chatted with and interviewed, hung out with plus both rhythmically and meditatively been immersed in all things Devin Townsend. He has undeniably and without question been the most massive influence on my life. An easy way to explain, describe or sum this up would be that Devin has been such an important part of who I am that I would say he has been the soundtrack to my life. But as with all things that can be fulfilling and with so much Townsend content in the ether, his content can at times become too much or even overwhelming for whatever reason.
This had happened with me listening to The Dev during the past few years and to be brutally honest I lost interest. I classed it as “Townsend fatigue” and I lost track of his music for a period after his Snuggles, The Puzzle and even Lightwork/Nightwork releases. They just did not connect with me at all, therefore I did not see any of the early snippets and drip feeds of his new Powernerd album.
But when the title track dropped my curiosity peaked, I clicked the link as I was summoned to and was immediately blown away by its simple yet VERY Devin complexity. And so with a new release comes interview opportunities, and as always I was gifted with the great Dev’s time for a brief half an hour to discuss his new upcoming album.
The first topic of discussion was having a soundtrack to our lives. Thanking Dev for being mine, he then proceeded to delve into such an endearing and deep philosophical compliment; “…first off, I am very grateful for that! I feel that the past couple of years and particularly the writing and recording of Powernerd have been a lot of tests, and I am happy to be the soundtrack for people because without other people in my life there would be no soundtrack.“
I realise that by getting through this period that the only reason I was able to get through these difficult moments was because I am surrounded by such great people. My family, my friends, and coworkers. And I think that’s how the interplay between audience and musician really has played out, we all kind of help each other and we just have different roles. My role happens to be I’m fucked in the head and every time a year comes around I seem to vomit out my reaction to it. So not only am I appreciative, but it is also really important for me to point out how much my ability to create a soundtrack for people involves the people in my life right?
At being given the chance to ponder this revelation for the both of us, I then asked Dev what the soundtrack to his life sounded like? “I love sound so much, and I love silence, of course,” he shared. “Sound for me is really comforting, but words seem to not be anymore. The only time I listen to heavy music now is when I’m mowing the lawn, so I mowed the lawn today before our interview, and I was listening to Judas Priest (who) did a re-issue of Rocka Rolla with a new mix and I listened to a couple of other things but other than that the soundtrack to my day is…” Devin pauses here for a moment and then continues, “I had a friend describe my listening habits, because I have music on all day, like a cat fell asleep on a keyboard somewhere!”
We both have a chuckle at this revelation, and he continues, “So I just have these kind of like soft pads playing in the background and the function of it, whether or not it’s a dark tonality or an optimistic tonality, the function of it is like a soundtrack to my day. And my day includes so many things conversationally as well as like talk to folks like yourself, or I’ve got people that I work with or there’s obligations that I’ve got to go to, and I have a playlist of really quiet ambient music that is just so sparse and minimal that a lot of times when people are around me that they don’t recognise that music is playing, and to me that’s my soundtrack and I love it and I can’t get enough of it!”
On now to the topic of the new Devin Powernerd album, I consciously queried him about the seemingly simple yet enormous task he placed on himself at writing an album in eleven days. Him saying that he wanted to be free of any constraints, but knowing Townsend the way we all do, this was always going to be a pressure that directly opposes the process of any simple notion that was his artistic thought freedoms but also constraints. He responds “the two things that spring to mind is one, the riffs, choruses and a lot of the songs I had skeletons of ideas before those twelve days so assembling it in that time I did have some prior material to draw from…but that being said my tendency to overthink things is just historically been problematic in one way or another or a rabbit hole that by the end you try to drag yourself out of. So with Powernerd I tried to put those parameters in place because the nature of the music was meant to be almost like an olive branch for people who have tolerated a lot of what was unexpected during the pandemic, like The Puzzle or Lightwork. I didn’t expect any of that, but my reaction to my environment is always going to create music. So with Powernerd I really wanted to say to people prior to giving The Moth to people was, listen, thanks so much for the support, here’s some riffs, here’s some songs! And in order to create the urgency that I wanted to get for the record to sort of imply that sense of straightforward music, I felt that parameters would be appropriate and in the very beginning they were but as I’ve said over and over in this interview cycle my family and I went through a lot of trauma during the period that I wrote this and recorded it. The type of experience of grief that we had during it was something that I realised upon finishing the record, I had never allowed myself to fully sink into. It had always been I would always rationalise the grief or intellectualise the grief or whatever so it’s compartmentalising, so you don’t have to sink into I guess. But this time it was just too much man and I just…all this emotion that I guess I’d suppressed for all these years it just started coming out. And as somebody who had never cried in the past or even expressed anger in the past, to have all those things start coming out and in waves I felt like I couldn’t even control, it’s like there’s a crack in the dam then all of a sudden the pressure builds up, and you just have to be witness to this, and I realised how emotionally immature I am and (with) all these things I just didn’t know how to deal with them. To have what in the beginning with Powernerd was a very simple mission statement, right! It’s a party record, it’s a simple record, it’s a rock record, by the time I started digging into the lyrics at that point what we were going through was such that I listened to the original lyrics and realised that I can’t rationalise just saying nothing. It’s not the way that it needs to be, so it became this fundamental contradiction with Powernerd where on one hand it’s a simple rock record and on the other hand it was the soundtrack to a point in my life that was so foreign to me and so emotionally complex that it became just being about that!”
The incredibly prolific and brilliant great man that is Devin Townsend further reaches into to his beautifully profound heart and mind, telling us about the journey of creating what was initially a simple thank you to his fans to a diary journal of realising and then scripting an entry that would encompass a multitude of emotions that we all have at some point in our adulting lives, experienced and chosen to either repress or express to a wider forgiving and loving group of those around us willing to hug us compassionately and without judgement.
Like always, if you listen to the full interview podcast with The Dev, you’ll hear further profound insights and meanings behind other songs on the upcoming Powernerd album as well as tracks from his past.
