In 2016 Devin Townsend announced he’d started work on The Moth, a symphonic rock opera centred around sex and death. The project lay dormant for a number of years, but it’s finally out as the singer/multi-instrumentalist comes to terms with his personal life being turned upside-down. He tells Prog about the decade-long backstory and intense themes of his self-described “life’s work.”
Devin Townsend wasn’t allowed to be emotional when he was a kid. Born in Canada to a family of British and Irish immigrants, his parents forced him to maintain a proverbial stiff upper lip and keep his anger, sadness and even joy to himself. One of the few ways of letting his feelings out without being seen as uncouth was listening to musicals with his mum and dad.
“It was like, ‘You’re upset? You’re gonna wanna keep that quiet, because you’re gonna spoil dinner for everybody,’” the 53-year-old prog metal maestro remembers. “But music was a loophole. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, musicals were such a part of the lexicon of my family’s communication skills, whether we were singing the songs to each other or referencing the humour of a film.”
Townsend loved West Side Story, Jesus Christ Superstar and Paint Your Wagon, and it’s a passion that’s endured well into his adult life. His 30th (yes, 30th) album, The Moth, is rooted in the same symphonic drama as those influential films. It’s a near-80-minute, strings-loaded prog opera recorded with the 70-piece North Netherlands Orchestra and a 65-person choir, with 24 songs telling the story of a hero’s journey from birth to death. Many current and former collaborators, including guitarist extraordinaire Steve Vai and singer Anneke van Giersbergen, make appearances.
Townsend – once renowned for his ability to unload records as quickly as machine-gun fire, not just under his own name, but through such bands as extreme metal aggressors Strapping Young Lad and ambient country duo Casualties Of Cool – has referred to the project as his “life’s work,” having chipped away at it for almost a decade. “It feels like I’ve been taking a 10-year shit,” he says, “and I’m just wiping now.”
He first announced The Moth in 2016, saying it was the next thing on his to-do list after the Devin Townsend Project’s Transcendence. The following January, during a now-famous Vice interview, he said it’d be a stage show about “cocks and vaginas and death” and that he’d need $10million to get it off the ground.
The next big update didn’t come until 2024, when he revealed it would be an album and the follow-up to that year’s PowerNerd. Then, in March 2025, he played the whole thing in full for two nights only in the Dutch town of Groningen, suggesting that the release would happen sooner rather than later.
He says that, for all the delays and changes the project’s been through, it’s still the meditation on sex and mortality that he originally intended it to be. “When something comes to me it’s a 10-minute process,” he explains. “Ten years ago, I’m like, ‘It’s called The Moth and it’s about sex and death and transformation – and go!’ There’s no sense of, ‘I’m going to sit down and write this now.’ I just live; and then, as a byproduct of living, those creative moments, if they’re good, end up adhering themselves to your experiences.”
Many think about sex in positive terms: a bonding moment between two people who share a mutual attraction, or even just something that feels good. But Townsend talks about it as if it’s hideous. He calls it “a proxy for unity” and compares it to hollow things like pornography, social media and drugs, in that they’re all ways people “try and connect with something more than us.” In the liner notes of The Moth there are gross oil paintings of men with giant penises sword-fighting and someone else ejaculating into space. Prog wonders where this seemingly dark relationship comes from.
“Myself and a lot of people in my life went through formative experiences that were really traumatic,” he answers. “For me, sex from a very young age was coloured by experiences that were really difficult. Because it’s an awkward conversation a lot of times, it’s swept under the rug, but it affects our entire fucking life.”
When asked to open up about the nature of that trauma, it’s the one time in our 50-minute interview that he flat-out declines to say anything. “It’s not important to the conversation,” he says. “As opposed to me using this work as an opportunity to have public therapy, the idea is more, ‘Oh, I recognise how much it plays into my own personal development: these unaddressed traumas and unprocessed feelings.’”
Nonetheless, The Moth is clearly an autobiographical work. It has a narrative with a cast of characters, but Townsend is almost dismissive about it, beyond the fact that he wants to turn it into a book one day and that it’s a hero’s journey in the vein of writer/historian Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. More important to him right now is that it’s an allegory, the protagonist and their journey a metaphor for him processing his past experiences and how they shaped his personality.
You’re never going to be like, ‘You know what would be a great way to spend the day? Dig into trauma!’
“Is there a story? Absolutely!” he says. “Are there characters? Absolutely! Is it of any importance to the understanding or lack thereof? I don’t know. Maybe not. For me, it all served a real practical purpose: leaving home, going into the unknown, facing the demon, whatever it is; these big ‘hero’s journey’ archetype chunks. We made a wheel out of it that had 13 sections and were like, ‘This here is the quiet, this is where a war is, this is where the confrontation is, here’s the resolution’ – all these theatrical tropes that I was then able to write songs for.”
And then you connected them to your personal experiences? “Of course! But those personal experiences are what come to you after you’ve outlined it. I think, if you start with the personal experiences, you’re going to be fucked from the beginning because you’re just never going to want to do it. You’re never going to be like, ‘You know what would be a great way to spend the day today? If we just dig into trauma!’”
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Every story has an inciting incident: the moment where the hero is thrust into the unknown and forced onto their quest. Townsend says that his own – which made him want to open up on The Moth – was when “everybody left.” Around the time he started PowerNerd, his son moved out to go to college.
“I was stuck in this place full of broken dreams,” he remembers, “and I had to start writing PowerNerd. That record was supposed to be a fuck-around and it ended up being an album about heartbreak. Up to the point where everything went away, I had a certain amount of creative motivation that I gleaned from tenacity – ‘I’m the guy that can get through any of this!’ Then life put me in a position where it was like, ‘I can’t handle this; it’s too much for me.’
Accepting love was one of the most foundational changes as a result of going through this process
“What was so dramatic about it was, for the first time, I felt like I couldn’t put on a brave face. I couldn’t hide behind platitudes. I couldn’t be this, ‘Well, you gotta go through what you gotta go through to get to where you’re going’ – all this fucking shit. I was just kind of like, ‘I’m fucked!’”
He recalls crying as he finished The Moth at home with only his dog Oliver for company. The album includes a love letter to his loyal pet in the form of its ambient closing track, We Don’t Deserve Dogs. “I had this dog following me around, being like, ‘I know you’re upset, I want to be with you,’” he says. “And my reaction to it was like, ‘I don’t want to be seen when I’m emotional.’ Finally, I had to surrender to the fact that this dog had no agenda. It was simple. He was like, ‘You’re sad. I’m here for you.’ Accepting love was one of the most foundational changes as a result of going through this process.”
While the liner notes contain those graphic sexual illustrations, the album cover is a picture of Townsend’s face. That’s it. After so many years of deflecting and refusing to confront his past, he explains that he’s “unafraid to be seen,” adding: “If you’re gonna be seen, you’re gonna wanna go balls-out: Thelma And Louise it over the cliff, you know? In the past, when I’ve been guilty of not committing to it, it’s been, ‘I don’t wanna be perceived as being irrational.’ But I’m just a fucking artist, dude! This is a representation of an emotion that I don’t have a vocabulary for, other than fucking ‘Grrrrrr!’ To be able to do that and be like, ‘Yes, it’s me’, that was the goal.”
You have to be willing to see yourself as the person you are, not the person you want people to see
As for what’s next, he has an outline of a plan, although the specifics are a mystery even to him. “After a project like The Moth, all of a sudden everyone in my professional world might be like, ‘Make more metal, fuck-face!’” he laughs. He said in 2024 that the follow-up to The Moth would be an album called Axolotl, but he reveals today that he has 10 projects on the go, and that “the one that takes pole position is going to be the one that’s most creatively compelling.” What matters far more to him right now is that he’s just made music that is true to his experiences, no deflections or platitudes in sight.
“What’s important is the truth: who you are, making peace with who you are,” he says. “These are subtle things. All they require is being able to sit with yourself and your pain, really being present with yourself in ways that are really fucking uncomfortable, because you have to be willing to see yourself as the person you are, not the person you want people to see.”
The Moth is on sale now.
