Corey Taylor Is One Of The Greatest Musicians I Have Ever Heard.
Don't be fooled by the scary mask. I was for pretty much my entire life and it resulted in me avoiding one of the greatest vocalists I've ever heard, Corey Taylor, and the entire genre because of false assumptions.
I blogged about it this past weekend but yah, I'm an idiot.
I'd always thought all heavy metal since the 80's was death metal where you can't hear the words because the singer is just screaming bloody murder and you don't want to anyways because all he's screaming about it bloody murder. I thought the shows were attended by skinheads and trench coat mafia type people and they dump buckets of blood on the crowd.
After going to my first metal show last week, seeing Corey and his band up close, live, at Chicago's Riviera Theatre, I quickly realized how wrong I was.
There are very few moments in life that you experience something so stunning to your senses that you know there and then, in the moment, that it's special, and you'll remember it for the rest of your life. Either visually seeing something, audibly hearing something, tasting something, smelling, or feeling. They say the more senses affected by something the greater chance your brain has to remember it. But sometimes all it takes is one to be stirred on such a high level.
For me it's the first time ascending the stairs out of the tunnel and seeing the field at Fenway Park for the first time as a little kid. My first time tasting cheese cut from a perfectly aged wheel in Parma, Italy. My first sip of Opus One at their vineyard in Napa. Hearing Miley Cyrus do vocal exercises during her warm-up rehearsal backstage at United Center. Seeing hundreds of grown men and women flood the streets of downtown Chicago, and weep tears of joy and hug strangers when the Cubs won the World Series in 2016. Some pretty awesome things.
I knew last Thursday night when I was standing in the crowd at The Riv and heard the first bars that Corey belted out that I was hearing somebody next level.
His voice is like nothing I've never heard before.
For a relatively smaller guy, it fucking BOOMS like an opera singer.
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He's able to drop it and reach some of the deepest notes and then come back and raise it just as equally high on the very same song. It's insane. His range is bonkers. His stage presence is mesmerizing. I wrote more about it detail in the blog I posted above but it seriously blew my mind.
We got to sit down with Corey for over on hour earlier that Thursday afternoon and to put it simply, the guy is the fucking man. And soooooo fucking smart. He's one of my favorite guests we've ever had on and I can see why he has millions of fans around the world.
Give it a listen and give us a follow -