Trivia / Devin Townsend

• Acting for Two: Devin did just about everything for Ziltoid the Omniscient. All singing parts, most of the spoken vocals, guitars, drums, bass, keyboards, production...
• Cash-Cow Franchise: Ziltoid. The sheer amount of merchandise you can get (t-shirts, coffee cups, hats and, of course, the coveted Ziltoid hand puppet) proves this.
• Creator Backlash: For a guy who's been making music for over 20 years in some form or another, it's inevitable he will have at least some.
  • Initially, his work with Vai. He ended up really disliking it because the band's manager tried to force him to be something that he wasn't.
  • The song "Lucky Animals"; he's gotten sick of it because his kids and his friend's kids learned it and repeat it to him ad nauseum. (That said, he still performs it live, but he prefaces it by saying that the song sucks).
  • This was one of the reasons why Townsend stopped SYL; it became less about creating an outlet for his angst and more about fans wanting him to tell everyone to fuck off.
  • He has expressed similar feelings about the DTP "style" of music and was about to totally abandon it as part of his fifth Creator Breakdown (see below). The management team he brought on board had to convince him with Tough Love to carry on making, in his words, "songs with choruses".
  • He feels this way about Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing, calling it "nothing but remixed demos" in various interviews. He did love "In the Rainy Season" off it though, and still played it at almost every SYL show till the end.
  • He seems to regard Physicist and Infinity to be this, due to his self-described messiah complex and then-untreated bipolar disorder, compounded by his heavy drug use at the time those albums were produced.
• Creator Breakdown: He seems to have them with regularity.
  • Breakdown 1: Checked into a mental hospital for bipolar disorder in 1998 after the release of Infinity.
  • Breakdown 2: Stopped taking bipolar medication during the writing of SYL's Alien.
  • Breakdown 3: Showed up at a press conference to announce that he was withdrawing from music to become a puppeteer. This would turn into Ziltoid the Omniscient.
  • Breakdown 4: Detoxed himself leading up to 2009's Ki, when he realized he had difficulty doing any writing without booze or weed. He also admitted to an internet porn addiction, calling it "worse than crack cocaine".
  • Breakdown 5: When he declared he was taking a year off after the release of Z2 because he was burned out. He explained in an interview with longtime friend Chris Jericho that he announced this because he had lost all direction with his career; within a few months of the announcement he had hired a new management team to help him focus his career and began working on a new album, which became 2016's Transcendence.
• He Also Did: Quite a lot of things, apparently.
  • Devin is quite a prolific producer. He produced Natural Born Chaos by Soilwork, As the Palaces Burn by Lamb of God, Beyond Hell by GWAR, and Controller by Misery Signals, and that's only a few of the albums he's been involved in as a producer in some way or another.
  • He mixed The Direction of Last Things by Intronaut.
  • Not to mention all the various things he's done with Steve Vai over the years.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The music videos for "Life" and "Christeen" have never seen a release on any of Devin's DVDs and can only be viewed on Youtube and other video sites in the form of low quality VHS rips that were recorded when the videos happened to be shown on TV years ago.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition:
  • The Strapping Young Lad vinyl box set, which, if you're even remotely a fan, is amazing. It was released in four different editions, each of which had more material than the preceding tier (in addition to being coloured differently). All versions of the box set are now sold out. The vinyl masters also decreased the Loudness War tendencies of Strapping's material (although the clipping on Heavy and The New Black couldn't be completely eliminated due to the master tapes apparently having been lost).
  • There was also a CD box set of the first four Devin Townsend Project albums (the latter two of these being remastered, as the original mixes hadn't been to Townsend's satisfaction) along with two discs of bonus material and (with some releases) a 10" with two additional songs.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content:
  • Devin invited fans to create their own unofficial music videos for "Lucky Animals". The official video was then made by stitching fan submissions together.
  • Both discs of Z2 feature the "Universal Choir", composed of the voices of over 3000 fans who submitted recordings of them singing parts of the song.
• Promoted Fanboy: Anneke van Giersbergen got the job as vocalist for the Devin Townsend Project by sending Devin a video of herself singing "Hyperdrive" from Ziltoid. She would later sing it on Addicted.
• What Could Have Been: Much like Ziltoid, Ghost was supposed to have a sequel. Devin canned it because he felt the music that he was recording didn't fit the vibe, so he cancelled it. Most of the songs recorded ended up in the box set Contain Us and a bonus disc in Casualties of Cool's deluxe edition.

---