Lauren Wise of the Phoenix New Times recently conducted an interview with SLIPKNOT/STONE SOUR frontman Corey Taylor. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Phoenix New Times: SLIPKNOT is doing a bunch of shows this year. Is that confirmation that you guys will be working on new music soon?

Corey: Not soon, but yeah, yeah. It's just part of the process, just making our way towards the future, basically. The band took a pretty big hit with the loss of Paul [Gray, bass] and we're just doing what we can to carry on in his memory. And part of that is coming back together as a band. The more tours that we do the more we try to make sense of it all. We're just taking baby steps and trying to do it right. Not rush into anything, and just get to a point where we're ready to make music without Paul. Which is going to be really hard, but we need to go down that road and uh, just coming together as a family again for it to be right.

Phoenix New Times: Let's talk about STONE SOUR. The follow-up to 2010's "Audio Secrecy" is slated to come out this fall, right?

Corey: Yes, it's coming out later this year. Not sure when yet. We're actually working on a double concept album that is a monster. Trust me. Just from the demos we're doing right now, the music is really, really good. It's probably the best we've ever written. And we're really excited about that. When we started working in the studio putting everything together...we're trying to figure out right now if we're going to release the discs together or separately, one at a time. But I've written a really cool story that goes along with it, and we're going to have a bunch of cool artwork and multimedia tied in with it as possible. So it's going to be pretty epic in scale.

Phoenix New Times: What's the concept behind the album?

Corey: It's really a morality play. It's about a person trying to find himself, or herself. You know, everyone in their lives finds themselves inevitably at a crossroads when it comes to personal evolution and whatnot. Trying to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives. You know, you can either stay where you are and relive the past and run backwards and basically buying into the romance of youth and those things that come with it, stagnating your growth. Or you can keep moving down the path and eventually cross into the next phase of your life. It's basically the story of a man trying to figure it out, and there's a lot of things that go on in a guy's head when he's trying to figure out the right thing to do.

Read the entire interview from Phoenix New Times.