Devin Towsend on his 'efficient' working style

Devin Townsend insists he’s not a workaholic – despite having a book and a symphony on the horizon.

The Canadian multi-instrumentalist says he can juggle the upcoming projects with his Ziltoid and Casualties Of Cool efforts because he’s “efficient” and not because he overworks himself.

Townsend revealed last year that the symphony – which he described as a “hellish apocalypse” – would be recorded in Surround Sound in Belgium and would come complete with a visual counterpart.

Now he says he has much of the work written, and that he’s finished his book which he previously described as “ridiculous.”

Townsend tells Dead Rhetoric: “Typically when I do interviews, one of the things I hear a lot is that I’m constantly busy and going, going, and going – but really I just think I’m efficient.

“I have a lot of time when I don’t do anything. I go for a walk, or go get ice cream, or go do yoga. I take weekends off. I’m not balls to the wall – when it’s time for me to work, then I’m balls to the wall.

“But deadlines are good for me, and I think my process after 25 years is pretty efficient. I can get a lot of stuff done in very little time if I put my mind to it.”

He adds that he has much of the symphony “written already” and that the book “is done.” On the symphony, he says: “I haven’t taken the step of allowing it to become an actual form, but there’s certainly a trajectory and an aesthetic and a theme.

“There is an objective in terms of what it is that I want people to feel once the music on the album is finished. So you put all those things together and currently in my mind, I call it The Moth. It’s this big, desperate jumble of information so far.”

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Stef wrote close to 5,000 stories during his time as assistant online news editor and later as online news editor between 2014-2016. An accomplished reporter and journalist, Stef has written extensively for a number of UK newspapers and also played bass with UK rock favourites Logan. His favourite bands are Pixies and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Stef left the world of rock'n'roll news behind when he moved to his beloved Canada in 2016, but he started on his next 5000 stories in 2022.