On 'Sons Of Anarchy', Taking His Kitten On Tour & Smoking The Bible

It seems slightly incongruous that perennial shock rocker Marilyn Manson has dropped a record delving into the blues just prior to heading down to Australia for Soundwave – the annual celebration of all things heavy – but Manson has never been one to play by anybody’s rules. After more than two decades exploring the grotesqueries of life via the metal realms, his new collection The Pale Emperor represents a substantial sonic departure, the swampy sound seemingly inspired by his ailing mother’s final days and the new friends and associates he’s made in the creative realms of television, where he’s been increasingly visible in recent times.

It’s a relatively melodic and accessible collection by Manson’s own standards – which will no doubt delight some and devastate others – and he’s pared back the theatrical elements of his craft which have long been so important to his mystique, almost letting his music do the talking for him. As he regales The Music over the phone about his new record, Manson proves an interesting and thoughtful conversationalist – even charming – but he does display a propensity to change tack on a dime, so it’s a (delightfully) challenging pursuit just keeping up with his train of thought. He’s both intelligent and the possessor of a deep mischievous streak, to the point that seemingly no topic whatsoever is sacrosanct. That Manson has no boundaries should be no surprise, but it still takes some occasional getting used to in person.

I’m pulling ‘my mum’s dead’ on taking the ‘motherfucker’ out of my motherfucking record, motherfucking motherfuckers.

“I’m very pleased with it,” he opens about The Pale Emperor, “except I was very unhappy that I received a copy of the CD from the record label not knowing that it was the Walmart version, which is the place in America that sells guns but won’t sell R-rated lyrics, which is ironic. I might do a signing at Walmart where I just sign guns, and you get a free record with it when you buy a gun. I’m listening to the record and thinking, ‘Wow, this sounds fantastic!’, and then I hear ‘motherfucker’ dropped out, and I’m, like, ‘You know what? You’re going to have to talk to my dad, because he fucked my mother and my mother’s dead’. I said that to the guy from the record label; I used the ‘mother’s dead’ bit because my father said when my mum died that we would keep it not sad when it happened – it happened while we were making the record. And of course it is sad, but to keep it not sad my father said, ‘You have a five-year “get out of anything that goes wrong” [period] on your mum’s death’. You could be fucking somebody in a gutter and say, ‘I’m sorry, my mum’s dead’. I said, ‘Dad, five years seems a little excessive – let’s just say two years’. So I’m pulling ‘my mum’s dead’ on taking the ‘motherfucker’ out of my motherfucking record, motherfucking motherfuckers. Motherfuck. Just ask my dad because he fucked my mum, so he’s a motherfucker.”

Okay, so far, so weird. What about The Pale Emperor’s new direction, was that planned in advance or just where he and chief collaborator Tyler Bates wound up during the creative process?

“It just seemed to end up that way,” Manson ponders. “I suppose at the time I’d just finished touring, and Tyler Bates and I originally met at the wrap party for Californication – he scored the show, and I was on it playing myself – and he asked me to come onstage and perform. It was a party for everyone in the cast, and I went onstage and sang Hotel California, I think. This was also around the time when I started doing other things which I’m not really accustomed to doing – I went onstage with Shooter Jennings in a small bar and I sang some song with him, and technically he’s responsible for getting me on Sons Of Anarchy because he brought [creator/producer/director] Kurt Sutter to my home and made him listen to my album. Kurt Sutter wanted to put Warship My Wreck as the opening or the ending of Sons Of Anarchy, but somehow I tricked him into being on the show.

“Because it’s my father’s favourite show, and I got the call about being on the show when I went to Ohio for my mother’s funeral – when I say funeral, she was cremated – but we were sitting at the table, and I went with Tony, my manager, who I’ve known for 22 years – he’s from Ohio also – and I didn’t really want to go by myself, and he’s sort of a surrogate babysitter/father to me; he’s the one who has to deal with me, and his percentage as a manager also comes in two parts, the success and the pain and suffering. So he got the phone call when I’m sitting there with my father, and I thought that I was just going to get a song on the show, and he said, ‘Hey man, you’re going to be on the show!’ I said, ‘Dad, I’m going to be on the show! For six episodes!’ And then Tony said, ‘Yes, but it’s better – you’re going to play the leader of the Aryan Nation, and it’s better because all of your scenes are with Charlie Hunnam, and it’s better because you get paid! Boom!’

“It was my dad’s favourite show and my favourite show, so it was exciting, but that sort of masculine element was happening as my mother’s death was happening, and I didn’t feel like I was becoming mature or being a man or anything, but suddenly the idea of… not mortality or the expectation of dying, because we all know – spoiler alert – you die in the end, everyone does, but the idea of the snake eating its own tail and the fact that this is the life that we’ve already lived, and maybe that explains déjà vu - it explains why things start to come together in the proper way… So then everything started to happen in sequence properly… and if you could see me now for some reason I’m drawing a circle in the air, because I tend to talk with my hands,” he chuckles self-deprecatingly, “but it couldn’t have been more fated that it all happened then, and I think the song that I wrote after that – because the record had been created, but I hadn’t played it for my father at that point, because I didn’t really feel like it was appropriate, my father and I were trying to keep it as un-sad as possible, and I don’t know if un-sad is a word, but if it isn’t I just made it up, so “fuck you” in parenthesis if it isn’t…

"In the Hollywood Hills these coyotes tend to pounce in packs upon animals that are outside, and my kitten Lily White – that’s her full name, like a person, but she’s not an outdoor cat; she’s spoiled, but she’s been on tour with me since she was a kitten … so I thought about her because it was a pack of wild animals mauling a smaller animal...

“With my mother, I’d made my peace and said goodbye to her two years ago, and at least she wanted to let my father go, so when I wrote [closing track] Odds Of Even I was taking a piss at the studio – literally – and I heard outside the studio through the window these coyotes, because in the Hollywood Hills these coyotes tend to pounce in packs upon animals that are outside, and my kitten Lily White – that’s her full name, like a person, but she’s not an outdoor cat; she’s spoiled, but she’s been on tour with me since she was a kitten, except in Europe and Australia and Asia, so really only in North America, it’s hard to cover all the countries – so I thought about her because it was a pack of wild animals mauling a smaller animal, and that was when the record sort of came to an end for me, because [penultimate track] Cupid Carries A Gun was a romantic ending to it, because I realise that it was actually the first lyrics that I wrote for the record but I had not sung them or tried to sing them for the album, but the story is very certain and very specific and very Biblical and very open to interpretation and that’s the essence of the blues feel; it’s not the playing of the blues guitar, which I like – I like the swampiness of it because it makes me feel like the two sides of my time spent in Florida and New Orleans.

“People always say that I have a redneck accent, and there are as many different redneck accents as there are Australian accents and many British accents. But I found that the difference between redneck hip hop and the dirty parts of England and even Australia, where you say ‘ain’t’ in a sentence, they are all essentially the same – it’s not really a disrespect for grammar, it’s more being a ‘hooligan’, and I think that’s why I think I’m very much a ‘hooligan’, and I think that I really embodied it for no reason. I don’t know what I was possessed by, maybe it was just me remembering being in New Orleans, which is a place where you realise that there’s not a great difference between when you see personally – which I have – someone in the middle of a fucking swamp doing some sort of strange voodoo hoodoo Santeria type of ritual, cutting off the heads of chicken and pouring blood on you, it’s not that different from some evangelical zealot in a church tent handling a snake and not being afraid of being bitten by it. If you look at them both they’re very similar – if you just look at them objectively – and they both think that the other is different, although I would probably lean towards the Christian element being more against the other one saying that it’s evil, but in a sense it’s all about how you worship and how you figure things out in your life, and for me it’s with music but I wanted to make a record that represented both sides of that coin.

“And mostly because I instantly for whatever reason – probably because it was most close to the truth in my life – identify with the story of Faust, because it’s about someone who sold their soul for something, and I sold my soul essentially – metaphorically, or however you want to look at it – to become a rock star, and in the end I’m supposed to pay something back. I think for a couple of years I heard this [raps knuckles on something for sound effect] knocking on my door and I ignored it, and I think that that’s arrogant and pretty much like the character in Faust who thought that he didn’t have to pay back his due. So this record is me paying back the due – with interest. Here’s you fucking payment, I’m back – fuck you, devil. Fuck you, devil!”

Manson has visited bluesy realms in the past, but more as a visitor than a resident – he did a cool cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ I’ve Put A Spell On You way back on 1995’s Smells Like Children EP – but is the blues something that he’s listened to a lot over the years?

“Thank you for that,” he says, processing the question and extracting the compliment. “I did that out in Mississippi – Biloxi, Mississippi – but there’s something very dark about that area of America. If you were to walk into a room where there was a stain on the floor that made you feel awkward, whether it’s cat shit or a blood stain or whatever it is, there’s something about that part of the world that is very unsettling. Living there, everyone thinks it’s so fun – with Mardi Gras and everything like that – but once you step off Bourbon Street you’re in the Deep South, and if you’re wearing lipstick you’re going to get murdered.

"But there are a lot of things down there, and I can’t define exactly what I believe in specifically when it comes to the supernatural – other than the fact that I’m not natural, so I would consider myself supernatural – but as far as angels or ghosts or demons and things like that, there is something other than us, but man created God so ‘God’ is just a word, just three letters… And it’s very ironic that God supposedly created man, when man created God – it’s a little ironic, got a little Gary Oldman juxtaposition in there. But it’s ironic, like ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg?’, well the answer’s the rooster and this record’s got full cock… and balls.”

I’ve had enough death threats in my lifetime to fill a million lifetimes, so I’ve learnt to not fear anything. 

One of Manson’s main lyrical conceits over the years has been exploring the duality of (or dichotomy between) good and evil – even down to his chosen name representing what is purportedly the best and worst of the human condition – so assuming that he’s right and there is no God, does he believe that those constructs exist to guide us?

“Is there good and evil?” he ponders. “Well it’s hard to define, but based on people’s barometer – what they think… well, I know that I have a moral code, I don’t fuck with people unless they fuck with me, and I think if you start a conversation with me that ends with me pulling out a switchblade on you, then you started the wrong conversation. And I protect the things I love, and if I can’t live without doing what I do then I’ve got to be willing to die for it – I’ve had enough death threats in my lifetime to fill a million lifetimes, so I’ve learnt to not fear anything.

"I don’t want to die – I have no desire to die – and I probably won’t die, I’m going to be immortal and I’ll be around a lot longer than this article, I bet the paper will dissolve before I die – but the point is that I am not afraid to go against to go against the things that I would normally have been afraid to go against in the past, and one of those things is myself.

“Making this record, I turned my life upside down – I had to change my entire schedule, get up at 6am instead of going to bed at 6am, to work on Sons Of Anarchy, and I was excited to go to the studio at four in the afternoon instead of being dragged there at 3am, and I gained some new form of enthusiasm – maybe it was a desire to make my father proud, or my mother, I don’t know, that’s not for me to decide – that’s for psychiatrists and journalists; I used to do that, but that’s your job. I’m not going to psycho-analyse myself. I think I told stories on this record that for the first time the music filled in where I stopped singing, and they both told a story, and it had a perfect amalgamation of pure alchemy where it turned lead into gold – it turned something that was nothing into something that was really special – and that’s the first time I’ve ever had that.

When I say 'biblical' I don’t mean the King James Bible, I just mean epic in the sense of fuck Charlton Heston and the Ten Commandments and fuck King James, whoever he was because Shakespeare wrote the Bible from what I’ve been told…

“The record was almost live, in the sense that there was a band, but it was mostly the fact that Ty would just simply put up a simple kick-drum four-on-the-floor beat and sit in front of me and play the guitar and I would sing – we wouldn’t even discuss what we were going to do. I just brought my one notebook, which has a honeycomb on the cover of it, and we would just go at it and just make it up as went. It was very different and very organic and very powerful, and once it started going it didn’t stop.

"I knew exactly what it was going to be once it started, and it was probably the most biblical and powerful moment – when I say 'biblical' I don’t mean the King James Bible, I just mean epic in the sense of fuck Charlton Heston and the Ten Commandments and fuck King James, whoever he was because Shakespeare wrote the Bible from what I’ve been told… But either way the Bible’s really good because it’s thick enough to hit someone in the face with. I did try to smoke a joint with a Bible page once, but it tasted like Ecclesiastes. It ruined my high.”

It seems that The Pale Emperor is one of Manson’s most personal batch of lyrics – more substance and actual investment than the usual pushing buttons and theatre – and the singer agrees: to a point.

“There’s as much me in it as there is you in it,” he reflects. “And that sounds a bit sexually oriented, but whatever characters are created in making these songs are equally manifested by the singer and the listener, so there’s no true story when you’re singing it. You cannot sing truth, because it can only be sung and then people believe it how they want to. I put my heart and soul into it more. And I enjoyed doing it. And it was not a catharsis, it was a rebirth – it was a chrysalis, it was a catalyst and it was a renaissance for me.”