DEVIN TOWNSEND
Devin Townsend wants to get something off his chest. For the last hour, he has been talking to Prog about his life, his career, his mental state, his view of sex and countless other things. “Can I just say thank you for taking the time to listen to me,” he says without a trace of irony when we’re done. “This process is as helpful for me as I hope it is for you.”
Where some musicians are guarded or inarticulate, the Vancouver-born singer, guitarist and leader of at least half a dozen bands over the last 25 years is the exact opposite. You get the sense that moments like this are as much a chance to work through his own thoughts and experiences as they are interviews.
But then Devin Townsend isn’t like most rock musicians. He’s both prolific and protean enough to qualify for the description of ‘maverick’. Whether it’s the mohawked brat-prodigy who rose to fame as the singer for guitarist Steve Vai in the early 90s, the confrontational presence who fronted heavyweight metallers Strapping Young Lad, the puppet-master behind coffee-guzzling alien Ziltoid The Omniscient or his more prog-friendly incarnation as the leader of the Devin Townsend Band and the Devin Townsend Project, his career has been a grand exercise in confounding expectations.
That’s exactly what happened when Townsend dismantled the Project a few years ago to pick up a solo career he’d abandoned in the late oos. His latest album, Empath, is credited to Devin Townsend alone and acts as a journey through his entire career. It’s dizzying and disorientating, moments of brutal noise giving way to blissful soundscapes, jackhammer rhythms slipping into calypso beats.
“Prog music, or heavy music in general, is a very conservative scene. When you
