Calling an album your band’s The Dark Side of the Moon is essentially calling it your magnum opus, and that’s exactly what Korn‘s Jonathan Davis did in a new interview with Metal Hammer.
The 1973 Pink Floyd album is one of the most legendary musical releases of all time, which is a statement that can be supported by the fact that it’s spent a collective total of 962 weeks on the Billboard 200 chart — that’s over 18 years. The Korn record in which Davis compared to The Dark Side of the Moon spent 34 weeks on the chart itself, peaking at No. 2., and it’s a personal favorite of the vocalist’s.
He was referring to 2002’s Untouchables, which apparently cost the band a whopping $4 million to make.
“It’s a very important record – one that couldn’t be made in this day and age. I call it the ‘heavy metal Asia’ because of the production and sound-quality,” Davis declared. “People use it to tune their speakers to this day. It’s our Dark Side Of The Moon, I love it. And that’s exactly what I told [producer] Michael Beinhom – ‘I want this to be our Dark Side Of The Moon’. He said ‘Cool, it’s gonna take a long time.’”
As a result of Beinhom’s meticulousness, it took the band over two years to make, and Davis admitted there were times where he “wanted to fight” the producer.
“I’d go in to do vocal melodies and he’d be like, ‘Ew! What the fuck are you doing? Go home, you’re shitty today.’ I can’t even count how many times that happened. My feelings were so hurt, but he knew I could do better and pushed me for greatness.”
The singer felt a shift around the time they started working on Untouchables, particularly in his lifestyle, which reflected in the subject matter of the songs. Korn were already massive by that point, and the excessive lifestyle laced with substance abuse was no longer fulfilling for him.
“Everyone was partying and I was the only sober one,” he recalled. “I locked myself in the master bedroom and wrote [Untouchables] all there. It wasn’t all booze and chicks and drugs by that point, it was just money. We could basically do whatever we wanted – we rented out three houses in Arizona just to write the record, then I started doing vocals and melodies in Canada. I didn’t like it there, I wasn’t vibing, so we moved, paying for lodging for everyone… It was crazy.”
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