“I told her to write a poem about batteries that are dying that cannot be recharged”: Slipknot’s Shawn “Clown” Crahan explains how Lacuna Coil’s Cristina Scabbia ended up on Look Outside Your Window

Slipknot percussionist/co-founder Shawn “Clown” Crahan has explained how Lacuna Coil vocalist Cristina Scabbia came to appear on two songs on the band’s new album Look Outside Your Window.

Talking to Rolling Stone, the 56-year-old explains that Scabbia’s relationship with Slipknot guitarist Jim Root, which lasted from 2004 to 2017, opened the door for her to sing on the long-delayed project. She lends her voice to the songs Cristina, a spoken-word track featuring an Italian poem she wrote, and Is Real.

“Jim and she were dating,” says Crahan. “She’s a talented artist, and she was up in the house. I had to go to Jim, like, ‘Hey, what do you think about getting Cristina on?’ And he said, ‘Absolutely.’”

He continues: “The first thing I did was make her write a poem, a letter of intent in Italian. I told her to make it about batteries that are dying that cannot be recharged. And she’s like, ‘OK.’ I have the piece of paper in Italian, and she did her best to read it to me, but I’ve never read it since then or memorized it. I just like to hear it the way it is. Jim and I were producing her, really making her get conviction. By the end, you could just feel it.”

Crahan adds that one of his favourite moments of the making of Look Outside Your Window was when frontman Corey Taylor heard Scabbia’s vocal tracks on Is Real.

“He had already sung on the song,” he says. “So he thinks she’s just doing the poem, but then she busts into that vocal, singing, going for it. I just remember Corey going back a little bit and he goes, ‘OK.’ He loved it, but it really surprised him in a good way.”

Look Outside Your Window will come out on Saturday, April 18, for Record Store Day. Four members of Slipknot – Crahan, Taylor, Root and DJ Sid Wilson – tracked the album during downtime in the sessions for 2008’s All Hope Is Gone. Crahan explains that the band took the idea of setting up a side-studio, or an “open lab”, from producer Rick Rubin, who’d worked with the band on 2004’s Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses.

He adds that the open lab became a “staple” after the All Hope Is Gone sessions, to the point that the band have 24 leftover tracks from 2019’s We Are Not Your Kind.

“That album’s fascinating because we had 21 songs and 27 interludes,” he says, “and all the interludes were made in the open lab. In the end, we only used three of them on the album. So there’s 24 other interludes.”

Look Outside Your Window was first announced in 2018 and endured delay after delay, due to Slipknot’s other touring and recording commitments. It reached the point where, in 2024, Root admitted to Metal Hammer that he’d more than once threatened to leak the album and get it over with.

Slipknot have no tour dates on the slate for 2026 and are currently writing their next studio album, the follow-up to 2022’s The End, So Far.