Jim Root has been extremely honest about his relationship with Slipknot's new album, THE END, SO FAR. The band's co-guitarist previously said that he wasn't fully satisfied with the way the record came out due to the unconventional recording process that resulted from the band being separated from one another in COVID times. In another interview, he revealed that wasn't able to contribute very many ideas during the album's writing process due to a severe spell of depression that squashed his creative juices.
Elsewhere in that latter interview with Guitar World, Root, who's historically been a prominent co-writer in Slipknot, unveiled his initial reaction when he first heard early versions of certain songs on THE END, SO FAR: "Oh fuck, this doesn't sound like Slipknot to me."
The guitarist was talking about how he was involved with shaping the final versions of the new songs once the band hit the studio, but didn't have a major role in writing them from the ground up, as he usually does.
"I helped shape and structure songs in the studio. But I didn't write and bring in stuff the way I did before," Root said. "I was majorly involved in the writing from Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses. And then I got in a bit deeper on All Hope Is Gone.
"I wrote most of .5 The Gray Chapter and We Are Not Your Kind. But then the pandemic happened and nobody could be together. I was home alone and I got stressed out and depressed. So my contribution was minimal for this. It's a good thing we had Alex [Venturella, bassist] stepping forward and picking up some of the slack along with Clown, who's becoming a lot more involved in song arranging."
However, Root revealed that he was concerned about the way the songs were sounding before he had a chance to put his creative thumbprint on them.
"When I first heard a lot of the arrangements, I thought, 'Oh fuck, this doesn't sound like Slipknot to me. We've got a lot of work to do.' I was kind of freaked out. What I heard was the symptom of having somebody that isn't in our age group and wasn't influenced by the same music.
"Alex was a Slipknot fan so he sounds like somebody that was influenced by Slipknot trying to write for Slipknot. But he had some good ideas, so we Frankensteined a couple of different parts between me, Alex and Clown, and things started to take shape. It was a huge group effort, but I was grateful Alex wrote the stuff he did because it taught me — not just about songwriting and arranging — but also about humanity, humility, ego and friendship."
