Interview by Rick Florino

"I'm not f*cking around. I'm living every day like it's my last," declares M. Shawn "Clown" Crahan.
      Clown isn't kidding around — and you can hear how serious he is on the Black Dots of Death's new debut album, Ever Since We Were Children. The album is a cornucopia of unsettling sounds, trembling textures, and Clown's violently vibrant percussion. It's dark, dangerous, and deadly. It mirrors Clown's previous output with Slipknot, but there's an ambience to Ever Since We Were Children that's more akin to Radiohead scoring The Silence of The Lambs. Clown wants to make you think, and he also wants to make you open your eyes. It's impossible not to feel everything that Clown commits to tape on a primal level.
      Clown recently sat down for an exclusive interview, in which he talked about his new album,  being born a drummer, the differences between the Black Dots of Death and Slipknot, and how he wants to make you uneasy with sound.

SHOCKHOUND: Does drumming come from your soul?

CLOWN: I was born to be a drummer. In the other band [Slipknot], I don't get to drum; I play percussion. When you see me play drums, you get the most of me that you've ever seen. It's the most intimate you can see me as an artist. I let the most go when I play drums. I've been known to cry when I'm playing. A lot of people in the world don't know I play drums, they just think I'm the Clown percussionist. I've played drums since I was eight. The reason why I play drums is because I had an anger issue at a very early age because of things that were going on around me that people weren't telling me about, but I instinctively was picking up on myself. I was able to feel these things going on; but people were trying to protect me and they weren't telling me, so I developed this really big sense of anger. It got to a point where I can remember having a teacher in a corner who just kept on me and I couldn't handle it. I just snapped because of what was going on at home and what was going on in life. The next thing I know, we're in the corner. That was right around the time I really started focusing on music. Before that, when I was younger, the doctor was like, "We can put him on medication." My mom wasn't a hippie, but she was damn close. [Laughs] She didn't want me to be on drugs and be a drone; she wanted me to live my life through what I felt. The doctor asked, "Well, does anybody play an instrument?" She said, "No one in our family does anything, but I'll ask him." She came home and she was like, "Hey, would you be interested in playing an instrument?" Before she even finished the sentence, I was like, "Drums…"
 
SHOCKHOUND: What made you so attracted to that instrument?

CLOWN: It was a natural thing for me because my mom and dad had taken me to see all the greats, from Johnny Cash to Ray Charles to Jerry Lee Lewis. My dad always felt like if you were going to like rock n' roll, you needed to see the greats. When the greats would come through Des Moines, he would take me to those shows. I got to witness all of those, and I'd always be obsessed with the drummer.
 
SHOCKHOUND: Was drumming always an intense experience for you?

CLOWN: I can remember setting my drum set on fire within two weeks of owning it. I acted out my own show and soon-to-be tribal or pagan war kind of thing. [Laughs] My mom would always tell me that we would be the band to play before soldiers went off to war to pump them up to win the war. It was a lot because of how I acted. This band is a personal window into me.
 
SHOCKHOUND: How have you changed since first becoming a professional musician?

CLOWN: I've been doing so much research on myself. Turning 40, I've taken a good look at my life: I've been married 18 years. My oldest child is 19, then 17, then 14, and then 7. Those are my kids. I've got two boys and two girls. I've been around the world. I decided with the Black Dots of Death that I wasn't going to pull any more punches — I was going to do exactly what I want to do. I was going to make the music that I want to make. It's going to have a bunch of different styles I like that I'm going to intermingle. It's going to have psychosis audio happening. It's going to have frequencies that literally — without you being able to control — will make your heart beat faster. I'm zapping you with frequencies that make you feel uneasy and I'm doing it on purpose; I'm wanting you to feel like me. It might unsettle you. When I'm making this music, there are a lot of times my wife will come downstairs and say, "I've had enough! I can't take anymore!" That's the kind of music I make. It's very emotional. It's very personal. My partner [Kane] and I aren't brothers, but he is my brother. He and I have been through the toughest times as of the last two years. He's been with me through all of the hard sh*t going on. He's a storyteller; he'll take a personal subject in his life to the furthest realm possible where most people aren't even going to dare to go, and he'll broaden it by turning all of the different angles on it and scenarios that are a bit profound in my mind. He'll bring that to me, and I'll throw my two cents in. All of our songs are these stories. It makes it very personal. They are personal, and they're all things that have happened. Then we put our twist on it, and we tell the story. Even though it's a story, you get the sense that this sh*t happened. [Laughs] There's a larger purpose behind it, and that's because it's a big piece of our inner self.

SHOCKHOUND: Is the final track "Been Gone So Long" particularly significant for you?

CLOWN: Yeah, it is for a couple different reasons. One, lyrically there's the idea of being gone so long, and I have been in my life — I've been in and out of the house. I've always had a problem with being in the rock'n' roll reality, which is fast and everybody's telling you what to do and when to do it; there's an itinerary. You stand here. You sleep until then. You get up. You eat now. You play. Then there's the home reality where I'm like, "What are we doing? What are we doing?" My wife responds, "We're not f*cking doing anything. You're at home. You can do whatever you want, so just relax." I've had that going on forever. Also, it's significant in the aspect that it's very different from all the rest of the songs. It's an excellent way to leave the record. It's very out there. Structurally and musically, it's different but still in the same mindset. It's an excellent way to say, "To be continued, and get ready for what's next. You don't know what's next. You don't know what this band is. You have no idea where we're at or what we're going to do." By the time you get to that song, you may think you have some sort of grip, but this album is so diverse yet so rooted in what it is. It's got a thread that goes all the way through it that every story is different. You couldn't tell the same f*cking story over and over, so we're telling nine different stories using a thread through it. I'm making sure that everything I love comes into play on this first record, so you get a little taste of what the future is going to be like. The future still holds secrets that we haven't had time to let out yet. We haven't even begun. We're just getting started.

SHOCKHOUND: How did the "Custom Song" idea on your web site come about? 

CLOWN: To be honest, the record industry is changing so much, and everything is going to the internet. I've watched it happen. Slipknot was one of the first bands to literally get on the internet and do that. I remember being on a 56k modem. You'd have to sit there for five minutes while this thing would or would not connect. I'd get so pissed off because I couldn't read my guestbook, since the Internet was down or my stupid f*cking modem wouldn't work. [Laughs] I've been there the whole time everything has been moving, and I love it. I love being able to go on the internet and get whatever I want. I can go on to YouTube, type in Van Halen's "So This Is Love," and I can watch that video that made me want to be a rock star. Back in the day, I'd have to watch MTV hour upon hour just praying they'd play the video. I'm an advocate of it. I do wish things weren't so digital and compressed. That bums me out. Nothing is analog anymore. It's not like an album where you get this pure analog sound. You're getting all of the music you want, but you're not getting it like the old days. There's a push and pull there.

SHOCKHOUND: Well, offering to make a customized song for your fans — at a price — is a completely different idea.

CLOWN: It's nice to come up with different things. I want to interact with the fans in ways I've never done. You brought up the special song. It does feel kind of weird to put a price on something, but there are practicalities in doing that. Number one, I have a partner — my record label. Number two, there are certain necessities in actually making a song for someone, like going to a studio. Then there's mixing and mastering. You don't just get the song done in a day; it usually takes about three days after practicing. The whole idea for us was, we want to make our own cult. If you read the special song idea, it expresses the sentiment that I love music so much. When I do feel like a song has been written for me, I'll listen to that song all week. My wife will say, "Can you listen to something else?" I'll respond, "This is how I feel. This is who I am right now. This song is helping me get through my life at the moment." The idea was, what if some of the kids that really fall in love with this and identify with it have some life situation going on? They can write it out in such detail and give us everything. For instance, let's say a guy's girlfriend breaks up with him because she's cheating on him. These are things I have experienced, and I'll speak for myself. I've had that happen to me in my life, and it's a devastating thing. It's also an excellent way to make art. You use that anger, hurt, and pain to create something. If a kid had that happen, he or she could write that out, and that could be healing. They're healing themselves by getting it on paper and explaining the situation. Now, they don't have to imagine the song was written for them; they know it was written for them. We take what they're going to say very seriously. We're hoping it'll be personal scenarios because I'm not going to write a f*cking song about Big Bird, you know what I mean? We're going to do our best to make it as special as we can for them. It can be part of the healing process. When people do it, it's going to be a profound thing. We're going to share it with everybody on the Internet. We'll put their subject matter the way they wrote it up there next to our lyrics and we'll put the song in the middle where you can stream it. Not only will it be written for them, it'll be written for everybody. Everybody can see what that person was going through. It's a real personal thing that we wanted to do.