It’s easy to assume that anyone who’s the child of a successful musician would also want to pursue that same path, but that isn’t always the case. Corey Taylor’s son Griffin Taylor didn’t even know if he wanted to be a musician before forming the band Vended.
Vended, which also consists of Shawn “Clown” Crahan’s son Simon Crahan, played a couple of shows with Slipknot and Jinjer in Europe this summer. In a new interview with Kerrang!, both Taylor and Crahan acknowledged that their relations to their fathers have given them access to opportunities that other fledgling acts may not have — they don’t deny it.
“Yeah, we got more help than other bands do and I’m honest about that,” Crahan said. “I’m not going to say we didn’t because that’s not fair to who our fathers are. They’ve helped us, but they have never, ever, ever, written our music, never showed us how to play, never showed us how to perform onstage, they’ve never done any of that. When people say, ‘Oh, Griffin’s dad’s probably showing him how to scream how he does,’ Griff is learning on his fucking own.”
Whether his musical talents were a result of genetics or not, Crahan was aware that he had a gift, and knew that he wanted to take advantage of it. Taylor, on the other hand, wasn’t so set on the path of musicianship — he had a couple of other career paths in mind, but it just so happens that Vended has been successful for them so far.
“People were like, ‘So are you gonna get into music just like your dad?’ I didn’t even know if I wanted to be a musician as a kid,” the vocalist confessed. “I wanted to be a florist, a video game designer and a police officer, and I think at least two of those things are still on the table.”
The frontman has opened up about how emotional the Slipknot comparisons made him feel in the past, but he has a better attitude about it now. He elaborated that their last tour helped him detach from the naysayers and realize that his main goal is to focus on being himself.
“I thought, ‘Either I need to accept this or I’m not going to get anywhere.’ If I just sit and dwell on this one fact that my dad’s my dad, it’s not only gonna give me a different worldview over the years, it’s just going to make me a bitter and more difficult person to work with. I just need to accept it.”
