Words by James Lavel
PowerNerd – noun
2. A total f**king badass.
3. You.
Devin Townsend is a musician who defies categorisation. Known for his genre-spanning versatility and unique blend of progressive metal, rock, and ambient soundscapes, his work is as intense and personal as it is expansive and atmospheric. In our recent conversation, Townsend opened up about the immense personal and creative challenges he faced while crafting his latest album. With his characteristic blend of humility, grit, and humour, he delved into the relentless, cathartic process of balancing creative ambition against the reality of life’s demands—family, grief, and the unrelenting push of time. What emerged from this difficult period is an album that he describes as a testament to resilience and authenticity. Join us as Townsend talks candidly about the art of perseverance, vulnerability in music, and his deep affinity for both cats and neurodiversity.
How have you been and how’s the process been working on working on the latest album?
It was very difficult, this record really kicked my ass in a lot of ways, only because I had sort of arrogantly assumed that I would be able to pull off this (frankly quite difficult) recording in less time than I usually do. I tried to impose that to make it so that I didn’t overthink it, but what ended up happening, as life has a tendency to do, is it threw a bunch of bullshit at us as a family that we had to deal with that was very difficult. So, trying to work on something that was already in a limited time space but with that added kind of emotional baggage that went along with those periods of depression and grief that comes from loss was a hell of a thing. but I think if there’s any real definition to the term power nerd it would be getting through a situation like that, and so working through that became like not a mission, but… I remember at a certain point thinking oh, I’m not going to be able to do this it’s too much, it’s too difficult, it’s too whatever. and then something comes up and you’re like you know come on, just fucking put it in gear, and that’s what happened.
I imagine that it would have been difficult given the album’s quite positive and it feels like it’s really got that that drive to it so then to have to battle with that and then keep everything on track. I imagine would be quite hard.
Yeah, it was a very difficult time man, but you know it’s like, these are human things; these are things that we all go through, right? So it’s not like my reason for bringing that up is to try to glean sympathy from anybody, but more just to say as I get older the act of making this type of music and doing these things gets presented with a lot of problems that weren’t there when I was 25. It’s just life and myself and my psychology and my family, everything has changed significantly obviously as a 52-year-old man as opposed to a 25-year-old kid right. And so you have to just kind of work through the things that are presented, and there’s a certain strength that comes from that resilience and I think that came through in the music as well because you’re no longer trying to summon these kinds of energies, you’re just like… dude. That’s what’s in the air right now. Everything’s crazy. The hardest part about it on this record on a technical level was the vocals; there is a lot of screaming on this record and I’ve realized now at this age that when I go for some of those high screams a lot of the parts of my body in tandem are just like dude, fuck no. You kidding me? Why are you doing this to us? We don’t get it. Yeah, but it’s what the music asked for so I just kind of like, I just kind of closed my eyes and went for it, but yeah the combination of all those circumstances was pretty intense, I gotta say.
No doubt man, well it came out really good. I’ve listened through and it’s awesome, I really enjoy it. It resonates with myself, and it will resonate with a lot of people since you know the lockdown kind of stuff, and you kind of changed your presence online and kind of moulded and changed into this almost neurodivergent spokesperson online that people seem to really follow and I really enjoy that.
I didn’t realize that; I’ll take it man. I’ll take it. I think that neurodivergence at this point, is less about it being an oddity and more about trying to define what your personal one is, right? I haven’t met anybody (recently at least) that I found interesting that hasn’t had some sort of neurodiversity. But I think that also the tide is turning, so even just the act of talking about your process or your mental struggles that come along with things maybe aren’t as romantic is what we were fed in the 70s and 80s from musicians. You know, it’s like, maybe the fact that there’s even dialogues going on about that right now is less indicative of neurodivergence and more about a changing landscape of what people are willing to be vulnerable about. But you know what, I’m willing to take it man, at any step of the of the way; the old quote, you know, “you call me whatever you want, just don’t call me late for dinner”, I think. Yeah, man, I’m cool to be… people call me Prague, and I don’t think I’m Prague. You know some people are just like, “oh you must be autistic” and I’m like I don’t think so. But if that’s what you think, I’ll take it.
It’s interesting you brought up vulnerability. I think that it’s always been seen as a weakness. I guess there was one question I did want to ask you around vulnerability. Was there ever a point within your career where you discovered the power of vulnerability and did that affect you creatively and help mould your work?
Well, I didn’t discover it in a way where it was like an angle that I was trying. But I think what I realized is that from early on I’ve had a bunch of things that I’ve done publicly that have been not received properly or well, or I’ve made mistakes in my personal life or in interviews, made a lot of missteps. And the benefit of that is that a lot of times I’ll meet people who are young artists or starting artists and they’re so petrified of making a mistake that they’re not able to take the risks that in my opinion are essential in order for you to not only find out who you are separate from your influences but also to present yourself as something different. I mean there’s a reason why you know the figure heads of any scene… look at metal for example, look at Meshuggah for example. The reason why thousands of bands try to copy Meshuggah but don’t do it successfully is because they’re not them; and the biggest way to find out who you are in my opinion, or in my experience at least, has been to put myself into positions that that I wanted to see if it would work and it didn’t. And then you very quickly get over that sort of shame of failure. And at that point you can just kind of work on what is important to you as opposed to in the back of your mind always having this caveat of, “Oh, I can’t do that because it wouldn’t be cool” or “it doesn’t sound like a band that I’m into” or something like that. The biggest issue that people run into after that is not everybody’s as cool as these cool bands. So I find it for myself when I really sink into who I am and I’m honest with who I am. You know, in the beginning, I was a little bummed out. I was like man… I wish it was cooler. It would be a lot easier for street cred if who I was wasn’t as interested in puppets and cats and dogs and you know fart jokes and whatever, but it’s just by recognizing who I am then I can just hone in on that and then that becomes, I guess in a sense, a definition of that vulnerability that allows me to be more honest about the process at least. Because I’m not either fetishizing it as vulnerability nor is this something that I’m embarrassed about. It’s not like it’s a provocative statement like oh, here’s me being vulnerable. I’m just like, no, this is where I am. It’s as simple as that and again, I wish it was cooler sometimes, but also I’m fine with myself. So it’s other people’s problem if they don’t like it, right?
I love that. There’s a lot of strength that comes in that I think and it’s very real. You got a couple other projects in the works too. You’re working pretty much all the time, I imagine.
Yeah, only because I love it. I mean, yeah. There are certain obligations that come along with the job that are like a lot of jobs, you know, like there’s the grunt work that comes along with certain aspects of it. But really, music is a privilege for me to be able to do, but it has to work hand-in-hand with my life, and my life is like crazy: like a family, and aging parents, and kids, and a mortgage, and you know, I’ve got a pipe that blew, or an electrical outlet the needs being fixed, and a dog that has been sitting by my foot here for the past half an hour because he either has to take a shit so I’m trying to keep him close to me so he doesn’t shit in the studio or he wants to play with the ball, but these are all examples of obligations that come along with my day. So, music is – as opposed to how it was maybe even 20 years ago – music is a component to my day, and functioning in its best way it acts as a mirror for the experiences that I have in a day, right? But I work a lot, but also a lot of that is not due to workaholism, but more to do with the fact that the music I choose to write or that I do write is not like particularly commercially viable. So in order to make ends meet I gotta grind but I’m happy to do so.
So I guess with so many things going on, when would you consider an album done to you? I know that’s maybe a hard one.
No, no, it’s not. An album is never done. I mean, that’s a quote that they used to tell me, right? They say an album’s never done, you just have to abandon it at some point. And knowing that, the way that I set these arbitrary deadlines for myself is I ask people in my professional world to give me like a tangible cutoff point to say just tell me when I have no more time, and I need to know two months in advance. They’re like, ‘Okay. You need to have it in by October 7th or October 15th‘ or whatever and then I work towards that, and then that’s how I know it’s finished. And during that time I do everything that I can, and every now and then you have to ask for another week or another day or two, but having that that deadline helps.
Obviously your music is very personal, you’ve said in past interviews about how it’s almost like a chapter of your life, at any point when creating have you used music as an escape or has it always been just a pure creative process for you?
No, no, no, it’s been an escape on a number of occasions and continues to be at some point. But I would also say that there’s a distinction between escape and entertainment on my side, you know; like getting lost in the process is entertaining for me. So at least at this point in my life I’m aware enough of my own self to know that any sense of music being an actual escape is an illusion. Like, I’m not escaping anything. It’s just a temporary diversion before I have to get back to it, right? And so with that in mind the idea of escape or the idea of it being a place I can get lost in is a fairly fundamental part of the process, but not one that I necessarily believe. I allow myself to believe it if I need to have an escape. The truth of it in the back of my head is like, you know, it has to happen.
When you’re getting into a new project do you consciously create a narrative before you start working on an album or is it something that kind of just evolves naturally? Do you have a whole bunch of ideas and then you go ‘all this kind of fits in this mold so I’ll kind of push it together’ or?
It’s a combination of a lot of things; because, you know, on one level I have a completely precise vision of what it is that I want to do. And fairly early in the process I’ll be like, oh, I know what this is called. I know what it looks like, I know what it sounds like, I know what it feels like. But the specifics of that… I don’t know. For the specifics of that, I have to just sort of go down rabbit holes and explore and then, you know, maybe it doesn’t work and I have to go back and try it again. And so, the objective in the long run is that when I finally listen to the project at the end, I’m left with an emotional sense as a listener of what it was in that very beginning stage of the of the of the process that inspired me. But the actual songs, the actual melodies, the actual sounds, that’s a process that gets figured out over the time that I’m recording it.
Okay something I personally wanted to ask you… dealing with the neurodivergent side of things that we’ve discussed is; when you’re on the road, how do you keep yourself level mentally? I know because the road is pretty brutal, touring is hard work, there’s a lot of a lot of shit that gets thrown at you and you don’t really know what tomorrow’s gonna bring. Do you have a process for working with that or are you the kind of person that just leans into it and just goes fuck it, let’s just see what happens?
No, I’m not that type of person (Laughs). Yeah, I have a number of ways that I sort of navigate that and some of them seem probably rather revolting to others, but I always have baths. I have baths even at hotels floating around in like ten years of people’s pubic hair, but I’m cool with it because that’s relaxing to me. I’ve got two to three sets of noise cancelling headphones that I basically live in and I have them on morning to night. In those I listen to music that is just really, really chill. And that helps a great deal. Morning and evening I do like a meditation, I exercise, I try to eat reasonably healthy on tour. All of those things are band-aids on a head wound in a lot of ways because you know, I’ve been touring for so many years that I would be lying to you if I said that you know ‘by doing all these things it’s effortless’, but you know, at least it helps. And I think that that at this stage that’s what I think people in a touring environment… that’s basically what you can ask for at this point. is just to find certain things that help and certain ways to carve out some space for yourself, right? I’m fortunate that now I’m at a point of my career where I have my own room and I, you know, even though it was a hard change for me. I don’t lift gear anymore; I used to do it all the time. I used to be very critical of people who didn’t until basically that the tour manager and the crew pulled me aside said listen, we appreciate the help, but if you fuck up your hands, we all go home, so just go back to your room, right? But you figure it out over time man.
Yeah, I think you got it. It’s chaotic. Otherwise, you just get washed away in the madness.
Yeah, you do, but I think that because there’s no human resource department for touring musicians, the onus is on us to find ways to navigate that. And that’s probably a part of the industry that is under reported, in that you’re gonna find out things and you’re gonna have only yourself to be able to find methods to deal with it. And compounding that, good luck trying to express any discontent with being a musician to people who aren’t musicians. I’ve got a buddy who’ll always shark me and be like ‘hey, how is the tour?’ and I was like, ‘oh man, it was a fucking gruelling one, you know; we had a 30-hour ride after an International flight and then a show through Romania with a crazy driver and then we had to play the next day and it was an important show and my voice didn’t work and it fucked with my head’, but the reaction is like, ‘you know, you got to get a real job if you’re gonna complain’. And I’m like, oh, right. All right. So, I just stopped talking about it. So now anybody else asks how was it? My dude is fucking living the dream every day. That being said, I’m very grateful for it. I love my job. But to think that it’s without drama and struggle is absurd.
Yeah, I agree. yeah, it’s certainly a time. Something dear to my heart and I think probably dear to yours is a recurring theme in your work the last few years I’ve noticed online has been cats. I just wanted to talk to you about cats for a minute because I think cats are amazing and I just want to know what resonates with you so much about cats.
Well, about a month ago. I had to put my cat down which was…
I picked a terrible, terrible subject.
No, no it’s part of life, man. You know, it’s okay. I was there with her and it was all good. But then I got this guy. (referring to the dog now on his lap) He fell into my life unexpectedly. I had to adopt him because of a number of situations that came up and I was like, okay, I’ll take him. But when I met him, he was… this guy was a fucking lunatic. Like he was just out of his mind. And I’m thinking, I don’t understand dogs at all. They’re just like weird cats. But now that I have been living with a dog and not a cat, I’m like, oh, yeah. They’re dogs. They’re just straight up. There’s nothing about them that’s complicated really. And cats on the other hand are… it’s like a conditional relationship with a cat which works both ways, because it’s not like an unconditional bond between you. If I sometimes don’t want a cat on my lap, I can kick the cat off and I’m confident that they’re not gonna be offended because they’re arrogant enough to be like well, I’m gonna come back. As opposed to a dog where I kick the dog off my lap… if I was to do it now he would just be bummed out, and now I have a depressed dog in my world and this is like beyond my capacity. However, what I recognize by the break from cats because I’ve just been a cat person for so long is that I actually really appreciate both, they’re like two sides of a similar coin, right? And the best way to describe the differences was a joke I heard recently, where the cat and the dog go to heaven and before they go in, they say to the dog, what did you do in your life? You know, well, I was a good boy and I took care of my master and I peed on the couch once or twice and I feel awful about it, but I really did my best. And he’s like, okay, well you can come in. And they say to the cat, well, what do you do in your life? And the cat is like, you’re in my fucking chair. Yeah. So, it’s like there’s things about both of those that I appreciate and relate to. Cats smell better typically. It’s just like a cute little dude that smells like a cross between horseshit and popcorn.
I’ve always wanted to ask someone this question and I think it’s a really important question and as adults it’s something that we don’t talk about enough. And I’d like some reasoning behind your answer. But what is your favourite dinosaur?
My favourite dinosaur when I was a kid was probably a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but I also liked the Stegosaurus, and I also liked the Triceratops and the Brontosaurus. And the reasoning behind it I think when I was younger is I was just intimidated by anger so I felt like if I had the Tyrannosaurus Rex as my invisible friend that no one would fuck with me.
Yeah love that. Yeah, oh I’m kind of conscious at the time I guess we’re almost there.
Well, thank you very much brother. I appreciate the interview.
Thank you, man. I appreciate it, too.
Yeah, I’m gonna take my dog out to take a shit and I’m gonna get back to work.
All right, thank you so much man.
Thanks to Sony Music Australia
