Drummer Jay Weinberg says legal limits once kept him from working with other artists

Drummer Jay Weinberg says he went through a stretch when he legally could not collaborate with other musicians, and that it cost him creatively. "Not having the legal ability to play music with other people was definitely difficult," he told the podcast Loyal to the Craft, adding that a part of his creative self "was dying" during that time.

He did not name the source of the restriction outright, but the timeline points to his decade in Slipknot, which he joined in late 2013 and left in the fall of 2023. The idea behind his newest collaboration, a song with the duo Softcult called "Drown Fountain," first came to him in 2013, and he says other songs from that period, largely built around metal and hardcore songwriting, had to wait years before he could finish and release them.

Since leaving Slipknot, whose own exit of turntablist Sid Wilson became public this same week, Weinberg has stayed busy: he toured with Suicidal Tendencies, launched a new band called Portraits of an Apparition, recorded his first solo music, and played on Fuming Mouth's third album, The Ringing Bell.

Weinberg has previously called his 2023 Slipknot exit confusing, telling Rolling Stone in April that it came without an explanation after what he described as an extraordinarily tense year within the band. Metal Injection, one of four outlets to cover his latest comments, framed the restriction as having kept him from creating with artists across disciplines and backgrounds entirely, not just within metal.