You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and,
piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.
My name is Tau Nguyen.
This episode contains explicit language.
Slipknot is a Grammy-winning metal band from Des Moines, Iowa, who first formed in 1995.
They've sold over 30 million records.
In this episode,
guitarist Jim Root breaks down how Slipknot made the song Unsainted from their 2019 album,
We Are Not Your Kind.
My name is James Root, and I play guitar in a band called Slipknot.
This song is an amalgamation of some stuff that I had written at home,
some riffs, and then some jams that I do with our drummer.
You know, ideas that we'd come up with while we were touring.
That melody line is what birthed that tune.
I always have melodies rolling through my head, and I don't always,
I don't really know where they come from.
In order to kind of reel it all in, I would go out to Los Angeles and work with our producer,
Greg Fiddleman,
who's very influential in helping me sort all the things in my brain out and make sense of them.
Sometimes I end up forgetting them, but, you know,