STRAPPING YOUNG LAD - Binge & Purge!
by Martin Popoff

Vancouver musoholic Devin Townsend has hatched the second of the Strapping Young Lad comeback albums and he's currently finishing up his acid bath detox fro the experience.

"Well, it was bad," says Dev, ready to take his new baby Alien on the road. "But it's getting better. I'm fat now (laughs). Not much though. What happened was, to make the Strapping record, I really went far into what it was to make a Strapping record. I was like, you know, let's drink lots, let's eat lots of spicy beef, let's sit in the basement and smoke weed and drink vodka and not take my meds and blah blah blah, and then that's what happened - the record. And then towards the end of it, I had a moment where I was like 'I'm f**ked up.' And so I just reversed it and started eating better and cutting down on everything."

So you almost play a part when making a record and then hopefully say "I can get out of this"?

"To a certain extent. But it's not on purpose. It's based on thinking that that is the best thing to do. Just feeling like a vessel for it, you know what I mean? You spend six months with your head in the red and then a month wearing Snoopy pajamas (laughs). But I mean, it's like, I can do this shit. I don't know, man. It's a really weird life. I'm a musician. And the downside of it is that you spend all this time recuperating from it, which sucks!"

Looking back on the making of Alien though, Devin says part of the process was regular, even business-like. One new thing however, is that drum titan Gene Hoglan was right there in the thick of it, writing with the Canuck madman.

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