The search for a new lead singer for Velvet Revolver has been going on seemingly forever. But not only has it taken a while, there have been a few different moments when it seemed like the band were ready to move forward with a new frontman, only to have things fall apart at the last minute. Back in 2009, they were all ready to announce their replacement for former frontman Scott Weiland, but then they abruptly changed their mind, never revealing who that person was going to be. More recently, Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor seemed like the answer, but that too didn't happen. According to one Velvet member, they'd even done a whole album with the guy. Alas, the chances are just about nil that we'll ever get to sample any of those tracks.
In an interview with Lokaos (which was spotted by NME), Velvet drummer Matt Sorum still sounded bummed that the grand Taylor experiment fell through.
"When we asked Corey Taylor to join, that was my idea," Sorum said. "I said, 'Why don't we get Corey Taylor from Slipknot?' And he's a great guy, he's an absolute sweetheart and he rocks. But Slash just didn't see it like the rest of us did." According to Sorum, Velvet Revolver recorded 10 songs with Taylor, enough for an album, but Slash vetoed the idea. "If we're not all feeling it together," Sorum said, "we can't do it."
While it was known that Taylor had been circling Velvet Revolver's orbit and had laid down some tracks with them, the amount of material he recorded with the band wasn't apparent until now. Back in April, Slash admitted that he had been the guy who put the brakes on the idea of Taylor joining the band. "[A]ll we were doing was just rehearsing with him and trying him out," Slash said at the time. "Auditioning him, so to speak. So, in order to do that, our process is to... we take a lot of music that we wrote and we give it to him and he writes his lyrics and he comes in and we just perform it and record it and see." But despite praising Taylor as "great," Slash confessed that, "It just didn't seem to fit right to me."
And so we wait for Velvet Revolver to find a frontman. It's now been four years since the group's last record, although individual members (like Slash and Duff McKagan) have gone on to do solo albums or side projects in the meantime. But it seems pretty certain that this Taylor-led Velvet Revolver record will probably never see the light of day -- except maybe as a bunch of extras on some huge box set in the future.
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