How Slipknot’s Root + Thomson Dealt With Their Depression

To say that many individuals went by means of a “funk” in the course of the pandemic might be an understatement. Two of Slipknot’s members – guitarists Jim Root and Mick Thomson – have revealed their very own bouts of melancholy in the course of the pandemic, talking with Guitar World about how they ultimately escaped every of their “funks.”

For Root, the guitarist admitted that even music wasn’t serving to him initially. “Guitars were depressing me, everything was depressing me,” says the musician. “It’s weird how the wires in your brain will cross up and whereas previously the guitar was an outlet for me to escape stuff, this time when I looked at it, it just reminded me of all the things that I wasn’t able to do because of Covid. So, this positive force in my life turned into this negative thing, which would’ve been absolutely fucking horrifying if I hadn’t been able to pull myself out of it.”

The guitarist remembers a few of his adverse pondering, including, “I was losing any sense of positivity. I had zero purpose at all. And I thought, ‘What difference does it make if I’m here or if I’m not here? What good is my existence? I’ve pretty much accomplished everything in life that I’ve set out to accomplish. How do I set new goals and why should I bother?’ That’s what was going through my head and it was scary.”

The guitarist also cites some home repairs and sorting his way through a bad relationship adding to his overall anxiety, but eventually he sought help. “Finally, I acquired depressed sufficient and darkish sufficient and sick sufficient of my very own shit that I reached out for assist and began seeing a therapist. And that actually helped. They say males solely hunt down remedy as a necessity. They gained’t go except it’s their final resort.”

As for Thomson, he additionally reveals he was in a nasty place. “It seems like every plausible metric is fucked currently. I was in a very bad place a lot of the time.”

When asked if he was angry and depressed, the musician responded, “Oh, I always am. When am I not? More than usual? Absolutely, sure. It’s been like a fucking horror movie. It’s the frog that doesn’t know the water in the pot he’s in is starting to boil. It’s turning up and we’re sitting in the fucking nearly-boiling water right now and we’re going, ‘Oh, this kind of sucks.’ If you woke up 28 Days Later-style, you’d say, ‘What the fuck happened to the world?!?’ It wouldn’t seem real, but in incremental steps toward where we are, you somehow deal with it.”

Where Root initially had trouble picking up the guitar, Thomson revealed that music provided his therapy. “It’s always therapeutic for me to be doing something with guitars. I’ve got pedals all over my dining room table. There’s guitars all over the floor. I just work on shit and experiment and play,” he defined. “I’m at all times placing pickups in one thing or swapping out a bridge, simply messing with stuff, adjusting the motion and the intonation. And as quickly as I’m executed engaged on one thing, I’ll plug in and play with it for hours.”

He adds, “What’s enjoyable about it’s that it’ll really feel like I’m dicking round with one thing totally different and testing it out. So there’s an pleasure about guitar as a result of I’m being constructive. It’s not, ‘Oh, look. Employment. Guitar.’ During quarantine, I spent hours and hours on that to get the whole lot dialed in proper. I performed a bunch for certain, however my psychological getaway comes from fixing shit and modifying stuff.”

Eventually the persistence to work by means of their points paid off, as a brand new Slipknot album is upon us. The End, So Far simply hit shops and you’ll choose up a duplicate right here.

If you or somebody you understand is combating psychological well being, assist is on the market by means of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration web site. To communicate to somebody on the cellphone, dial 1-800-622-HELP (1-800-622-4357) or ship a textual content message to 1-800-487-4889.