Devin Townsend – 'Underlying The Best Definition of ‘PowerNerd’'

The career of Canadian maestro Devin Townsend is a long, storied and often painful one. Many people, casual listeners, people who don’t follow the man’s story as close as his hardcore fans may not be aware of what he has gone through just to finish and release some of his most iconic albums (his autobiography, Only Half There, which came out in 2017, is very candid and revealing in this sense, and well worth the read.)

And so it continues, even as he enters the fourth decade of his illustrious career. It doesn’t seem to get any easier. His brand new album, the zanily but appropriately titled PowerNerd, was yet another grind to write, record and finish, although for very different reasons this time. But where does it stand in the ‘toughest albums I’ve ever made’ scale, we asked the man himself recently . . .

“They’re all difficult,” he admits, “the process of making a record, by virtue of its existence, is a difficult process, right? PowerNerd may be one of the most difficult of all of them, it really was. The only other two that I would put into the same category, but for very different reasons, would be (1998’s) Infinity, and (Strapping Young Lad’s 2005 release) Alien, because I was just so paranoid, so afraid of so many things during the making of that. Those two headspaces, Infinity and Alien, were awful.”

However, the difficulties the great man experienced during the creation of the latest record came mostly from without, rather than from within. “PowerNerd was different, because the headspace wasn’t awful, and I had support. Even though it was a difficult period, I was balanced throughout it, to the degree that I was able to be. So it wasn’t some kind of psychological aberration that was pushing me in the way of unhealthy lifestyles or anything. It was just . . . grief."

“As much as I’ve had to deal with people passing in the past, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a position where I could not avoid just sitting with it and having to go through it. So it simultaneously makes one of, if not the most difficult record I’ve had to go through. But also, it’s such a common experience, it’s something we all go through. It’s not something I’ve done to myself or some artistic BS that I’m trying to drum up to try and inspire passion or anything like that, no, this was heavy. And it’s common. So I’m grateful for it, because going through that was something that, to keep suppressing that I think it comes out in different ways as we get older, either anger or hostility or passive-aggressiveness or whatever.”

Devin completes the thought by summing it up in this manner: “So PowerNerd’s definitely in the running for the most difficult one, but was difficult for really, real reasons, as opposed to self-inflicted ones.”

The album is yet another highly idiosyncratic collection of Hevy Devy tracks, utterly different to what came before it and seemingly even more different to what’s coming next (and we’ll get into that in just a minute.) It is even significantly different to what Devin’s original vision for it was in its embryonic stages, and it is the abovementioned grief and tough times that set the album off on a different course from what was originally intended.

“So yeah, we lost some people close to us during the making of this record and it fucked us up, my family and I,” he states bluntly and candidly. “The fallout of that requires so much on a human level that you’ve got to contend with. The profound nature of those things puts work into perspective in a real quick way. To try and finish this record during that unexpected series of events was exceptionally difficult. I’ve never had to deal with that, I mean, the difficult recordings I’ve had in the past are due to my own hand! (laughs) I create certain scenarios for myself and whinge about it after the fact."

“This was a little different. I really realise how unprepared I was for loss and grief and a lot of those natural human things that we all have to go through. I think I locked it up in a cupboard for so many years and suppressed it in so many ways that the kind of one, two, three punch that happened during the writing of this record was beyond my capacity to suppress any more. And once you start processing it, the dam breaks.”

Sadness and grief profoundly changed PowerNerd during its germination, including the music and lyrics themselves, especially since his is such a heavily DIY operation. It even changed the album’s themes and philosophical intentions. It changed everything, as sadness and grief tend to.

“The act of making a record on a deadline in the first place is psychologically pretty intense because, when you record and produce and mix and sing and write and do the photos, do the videos, I’ve been it like that since as far back as I can remember, to have to continue to do that while dealing with years and years of unprocessed emotion, it turned this record from something that was going to be, in the beginning, like a olive branch I was extending to the audience to say: ‘hey, thanks for tolerating some of my weirder shit because I’ve got a bunch of really weird shit coming up after this, so here’s something that’s got some riffs on it."

“But it didn’t end up that way, it ended up being this expression of the process of how one deals with grief, the anger of it, and the acceptance of it, and the surrender to it, and then just not being able to run from it, and then sitting with it. And then on the other side of it, recognizing that as much as it feels like that, grief is not going to go away, and then one day it starts to change, and that was the experience we went through making this record, and are still going through.”

The album turned out to be a reflection of grief, and a reaction to it, rather than some kind of guidebook as to how to deal with loss and sadness and having a huge hole (or indeed holes) open up in your life. “So it became this representation of that process, but frankly, without any sort of agenda, I’m not on a mission, I’m not trying to make some statement about how to deal with it, I was just fucked!"

“The original lyrics that I wrote for it no longer applied. They just seemed so profoundly stupid, that I had no choice but to alter the lyrics and alter the record to be a representation of the period in which I found myself when I was writing it, and it just wasn’t expected."

“The fact that it got finished at all, I think is the best definition of ‘powernerd’ (laughs.)”

Despite the fact that PowerNerd turned out to be a bit more than a fun, riffy heavy rock record, it’s still an uncomplicated piece of work relative to some of his past material (compare and contrast with 2019’s Empath record, just for one recent example), let alone the mindboggling stuff he has in store for us in the coming years. 2025 and beyond promises to be a massive period of musical creativity and output for Dev. Interestingly, he has looked back to a past period in his career in order to move forward, and he is only too happy to tell us all about it.

“The next phase of my career is arguably the most interesting one, to me at least,” he says. “Any time there’s a moment of significant change in my life, I guess this is the second one that has been really significant, of course there was significant changes when I was younger, like with Steve (Vai), going to LA, Strapping and all that. But the real first life change, during the course of my career as a professional musician, happened when we had kids back in 2006. That just seemed to be such a mindfuck for me at the time that it came out as, first, Ziltoid, where he became this personification of who I felt I was at that age and what I went through with Strapping and kids and all that."

“But then to process that experience, it came out in four distinct categories: a complicated one, with Deconstruction, a straight-ahead one with Addicted, an abstract one with Ki, and a meditative one with Ghost. This period that I’m going through now with middle age, kids leaving home, losing people, parents now elderly, all that, seems to have inspired another Devin Townsend project, for lack of a better term, that has the same categories: PowerNerd is a straightforward one, The Moth is a complicated one, Axolotl is an abstract one, and Ruby Quaker is a meditative one. It’s just that the scale of it, I think, is bigger than anything I’ve ever done in the past.”

The centrepiece of it all will be the enormous, ambitious opus known as The Moth, and he has some extra-special plans for its release. “It’s sort of like an opera, in a way, really heavy, dark, strange, that I’ve been working on for about a decade. Before we put the record out, we’re doing it in the Netherlands, with their national orchestra and choir. It’s a huge thing for me."

“Axolotl is like alien pop music, it’s the strangest record that I think I’ve done. And Ruby Quaker is this YouTube show that I’ve been filming where I’ve built this spaceship that I travel through the universe in, and it’s powered by music, and each episode is a twenty-minute piece that ends up describing the creative process of all of these things and ending in this very big project that is a summary of it all.

“This next thing really really is a lot of things, man, it’s intense. In my opinion.”

Interview by Rod Whitfield

Stream PowerNerd here

Devin Townsend – Powernerd tracklisting

1. PowerNerd
2. Falling Apart
3. Knuckledragger
4. Gratitude
5. Dreams of Light
6. Ubelia
7. Jainism
8. Younger Lover
9. Glacier
10. Goodbye
11. Ruby Quaker