"It Deserves To Be Done": Devin Townsend Talks 'Transcendence' And Future Symphonies

There’s no point trying to lie anymore. In this day and age, Twitter, Facebook or Tinder will out you as a liar, cheat and/or pervert in heartbeat. They know. Whoever they are. Nothing is sacred and the entire script of your life – every act, every minor character – is fodder for the internet and, worst of all, your parents to see.

So, in 2016, it’s refreshing to hear Devin Townsend still being honest as a monk at Heaven’s honesty box as he readies a new LP, ‘Transcendence’, for insertion into some willing minds.

“If an artist says ‘I only do my music for me’, my two cents is, unless you keep it to yourself and nobody ever hears it, then it’s not ‘just for you’,” he says. “You have a responsibility to your fans, friends, band, label, management and all these people that are trying to keep you going.

"If you’ve got something people are responding to, and you can keep doing it while not phoning it in, then you should do it. I had to work my ass off with ‘Transcendence’ to find an angle, while continuing to care about it. Until I can’t do it, it deserves to be done.”

What ‘it’ is, by the way, is the wonderfully unique racket Townsend has chipped away at since the arrival of 2012’s ‘Epicloud’. We’re talking massive, pop-laden hooks clashing with orchestration and choirs as Zappa-esque wall-of-sound production pushes everything to the fore and riffs run rampant. Townsend’s majestic, multi-faceted vocals remain the binding agent of choice, whether on a three minute banger or 10 minute progressive noodlefest. Nothing on Earth sounds quite like it.

‘Transcendence’ is the seventh full-length released under the Devin Townsend Project moniker and is the culmination of almost a decade’s work. After his former band, Strapping Young Lad, disintegrated in 2007 (alongside his famous skullet haircut), the Project became an outlet for the man’s creative endeavours. Some bits ended up sounding like Enya, others like Opeth.

It was, in essence, a solo project. Since ‘Epicloud’, though, the rest of the band – Dave Young on guitar, Brian ‘Beav’ Waddell on bass, Ryan Van Poederooyen behind the kit and Mike St-Jean tinkling the ivories - have muscled their way in to form a permanent line-up. This sense of collaboration is one of the innumerable glories to be found within ‘Transcendence’.

“The writing stages focused on including the guys in the band and soliciting different ideas, then wading through 40 or 50 with them to home in on what this record wanted to be,” Townsend says. “I’ve been playing with these guys for 10 years now, so there’s an aspect of their personalities that played into the song choices. I presented a tonne of songs and the ones that everyone gravitated towards were the longer, more progressive-sounding ones, much to the record company’s chagrin.

“The way that the band contributed is maybe a little different from what it seems at first. A lot of the time, it sounds like we started from scratch and built it up from there. That happened with Failure, but most of the album was me explaining a part to the guys, then asking them to think of something.

"There were sometimes certain parameters – it has to be eight bars, I want to include these three notes on the guitars or whatever – but from there, it was a matter of them becoming extensions of my creative process.

"I could maintain the overall vision of the song yet have these parts that, in some cases, I was too lazy to spend the time on that they deserved. So they really just took the original ideas and made them cooler. A lot of ‘Transcendence’ was about letting go of some of the controlling ways that’ve contributed to things not moving forward in the past.”

Townsend’s eclectic repertoire is set to expand further once the Project wraps up the ‘Transcendence’ touring cycle, with a full-blown symphony next on his hit list. This undertaking has been on the cards for some time now and Townsend tests these waters further with ‘Transcendence’. The bombastic, overblown orchestration on Failure and the title track makes Septicflesh sound like a garage band and the songs are crash test dummies for things to come.

“The symphony won’t sound like that, but I’m revving up the engine and the Project acts as a forum to try a few of those ideas,” Townsend says. “To be perfectly honest, the ridiculous, over the top stuff isn’t entirely new. I’ve been doing ridiculous, over the top things for a while now. The interesting thing about the symphony is that since Strapping Young Lad, I’ve been really careful with everything I’ve written, musically and lyrically. It’s managed to evolve into this really positive and functional musical entity.

“‘Transcendence’ is really slick. It’s done well. It sounds right. Certain aspects reach out musically but, since Strapping..., everything I’ve done has been on a really tight leash – even [the 2011 album] ‘Deconstruction’ isn’t off the hook. It’s controlled.

"With the symphony, I’m looking forward to a complete departure from this sound, from all these things and everything that’s involved with it. To allow myself to go further than I have in the past decade, I want to take things in a direction that might be a risk, both musically and thematically. I’ve managed to gain the confidence to do that without it being self-destructive.”

The symphony will be no different from ‘Transcendence’ in terms of its core mission statement: it will be uncompromising music created by an individual refusing to set boundaries. Festival dates and headline stints have booked up the Devin Townsend Project’s diary for the next half-year or so, with a stop at London’s legendary Hammersmith Apollo taking place in March, but after that he will shapeshift again.

“With ‘Transcendence’, my hope is that we can get the sound that’s still relevant to me and the audience, but also to do it in a way that I still really care about,” he says. “By having these consistent progressions – when I do the symphony, or Casualties Of Cool, or ‘Ghost’ – I feel like I can do it. I’m not trying to convince the audience I’m a country guy or a classical guy and completely reject the notion that I was ever into heavy metal. That’s not the case, and my audience extend me a lot of liberties as a result.”

‘Transcendence’ should make a superstar of Devin Townsend. It won’t, because he’s not got his own reality TV show and he only used Facebook for the first time last month, but it should. The hooks are there. The brains are there and, as if that wasn’t enough, he’s got a book hitting shelves in the next few months. Only Half There is part-autobiography, part-handbook to the cut-throat music industry. And it was a right old bastard to write.

“I wrote every word of that thing,” he says. “I had a ghostwriter, but when I read it back, because it wasn’t in my words, I was just really uncomfortable with it. So I rewrote the whole thing. It sucks because he spent time writing it and it was really challenging. I’m an imperfect perfectionist, which makes everything I do irritating.

"It’s one thing to do it with an album, quite another thing to do it with a book with 150,000 words. Ultimately, it was a really cathartic experience and as a product it has value, especially for people doing similar types of music and artistic expression as me, because it was more a practical explanation of how the creative process works, how the business end works and so on. But man, what a nightmare.”

Townsend’s pulled off his most challenging, rewarding record since ‘Terria’, he’s written a book and he’s poised to soon deliver a fucking symphony for our perverted delectation. One day he might be able to afford a day off to catch up on that Netflix thing, but for now we can’t do without him.

'Transcendence' is out on September 9 through InsideOut.

Devin Townsend Project Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:

Sun March 12 2017 - BRISTOL Colston Hall
Mon March 13 2017 - MANCHESTER Academy
Tue March 14 2017 - GLASGOW Barrowland
Thu March 16 2017 - BIRMINGHAM O2 Institute
Fri March 17 2017 - LONDON Eventim Apollo
Sat March 18 2017 - NOTTINGHAM Rock City

Click here to compare & buy Devin Townsend Project Tickets at Stereoboard.com.

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