“I just felt like every day was a burden. I was just like, ‘This is crazy. I know I don’t have to feel like this.’”
Stone Sour guitarist Josh Rand is back in the band after a brief hiatus during which he focused on getting sober. It was a much-needed break, he told Loudwire, that allowed him to regroup and see life from a new perspective.
“In January, I just hit a wall with things, felt just terrible and decided that it was in my best interest and the band’s best interest to step aside and get stuff sorted,” he said.
He was on his way to Canada with the band when he made the decision to hit the brakes. He decided at the last minute at the airport that he couldn’t go on any longer.
“Everybody backed the decision… I had just spun into a funk, depression thing. I just wasn’t happy and so that’s why I made the decision. I just felt like every day was a burden. I was just like, ‘This is crazy. I know I don’t have to feel like this,’” said Rand.
Up until that point, the guitarist described having trouble getting out of bed and missing studio sessions “because I was just that down.” This made working on the band’s 2017 album Hydrograd all the more difficult for Rand.
But after three months of focusing on his recovery, Rand says he’s already reaping the rewards. “I have this new appreciation for everything,” he told Loudwire.
Like his fellow bandmate Corey Taylor, who is also a vocalist for Slipknot, part of Rand’s recovery is living a healthy lifestyle, eating right and “spend[ing] hours” exercising.
“The other thing I’m still working on… I was a person that would really never speak their mind and just bottle everything up,” he said. “That didn’t help me in many ways over the years, I’m sure. The band, we have a very open communication with the five of us and [are] truly a brotherhood.”
Taylor himself, the vocalist of the Grammy-nominated band, has been sober since 2006, after fighting his own battles with substance abuse and suicidal ideation. Last year he was honored for his recovery advocacy at the Rock to Recovery benefit, for speaking up about his trauma and his recovery.
“I knew that if I could open up and take away that stigma and show people that there’s absolutely fucking nothing wrong with sitting down with someone and talking about possible traumas that have happened in your life, or just talking about your problems, then you can help yourself a million times over, and you can help other people as well,” he told Rolling Stone.
