In an interview with chef Josh Scherer on the Mythical Kitchen, Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor revealed that he is at the age where he's been considering his mortality and has taken to praying to a higher power before taking to the stage.
"As I've gotten older, I realise that a lot of my impetuous behaviours [happened], because I didn't really have a foundation in believing in something," he told chef Scherer in a thoroughly entertaining interview. "Emotionally, I was pretty nihilistic. You know, as an alcoholic and as an addict, you tend to kind of drive towards extremes."
After considering that his mother's side of the family have lived long lives, Taylor has changed his outlook on life, and says that he has learned to be thankful for the good aspects of it.
"It meant starting over, looking at how I treated people who worked with me, how I treated people who I loved, how I treated people who I didn't need anything from," he says. "And the one thing that I can say is that when that time comes, I wanna be able to look back at who I was, and I may not have been perfect, but I wanna look back and go, OK, I like who I was at the end."
Taylor, who has been sober since 2010, says part of his revamped outlook on life involves saying a small prayer before going on stage, inspired by one of his recovery programme's main principles.
"I have a higher power in my programme that I recognise," he explains. "The name is Lord Mother, because it's a little bit of everything. This is something that I've come up with. I don't really trust a lot of organised religion, however in the programme that I'm in, we are obviously encouraged to realise a higher power that's greater than us. So to me, Lord Mother is the yin and the yang. It's the alpha and the omega. It's the ending, the beginning. And it's everything around us."
"When you open up to it, it's like feeling a breeze on the hottest summer day," he adds. "It's like a glass of iced tea, man. You get that little sweetness, but then your thirst is quenched. It's beautiful. And it's taken me time to learn to listen to it. And I've never been a religious person. I've never been a spiritual person. But letting go of that, of the incredible weight of ego, has helped me listen."
As for his last meal, Taylor admits he's given it some thought in the past when he was invited to be a guest on Ed Gamble and James Acaster's Off Menu podcast.
"Honestly, I only did it so I could really kind of talk to those guys, because they're two of my favourite British comedians," he smiles. "I really just kind of walked through some of my favourite dishes that my wife makes, you know?"
Describing his last meal for Mythical Kitchen, Taylor went for "full Iowa grossness." As for what that actually means to the non-foodies out there, check out the video below.
