Gearing up for his Empath Europe Volume 1 Tour, Devin Townsend spoke with Guitar World about the upcoming jaunt. Following is an excerpt from the interview.

GW: Will you have to change the arrangements to make Empath work live?

Devin: "Absolutely, yeah, because we are not using backing tracks or click-tracks or anything. The nature of the recorded material is that it is hundreds of tracks, so I have to scale the arrangements back tenfold just to make it function, but that being said, it offers some unique opportunities, specifically with this line-up, of really enjoying and actively pursuing different arrangements."

"For years I have always been under the assumption that when people go to see a show you want to replicate it, so that it sounds like the record. But what I started realizing towards the end of the last band I was in was that, after a while, it’s not really a performance; it’s almost like pantomime. It’s almost like you are doing a karaoke version of what you are doing. Sometimes the most memorable moments from these shows is when things fuck up (laughs). When things go south and you kinda have to improvise your way through it, and so I tried to view this first tour, that we are just about to start here, through that lens."

GW: And in if there’s a unique performance each night, it makes it all the more essential to actually be there, to live in the moment.

Devin: "So true. So true, man. It’s like every night is something unique, right? Every night on the setlist a certain member’s name is listed and they start the jam. I like the idea that everybody whose turn it is goes out of their way to try and surprise the others, and then you just follow and you just see what happens. And there is an in-point and an out-point but, in the meantime, some of the stuff that occurs is just so beautiful, and so unique, that if we had tried to arrange any of that stuff it would just be flat."

GW: Unleashed In The East (Judas Priest) gets a lot of grief for the overdubs but they left all that microtonal animalism in there and it sounds amazing. It makes it feel alive and dangerous.

Devin: "Yeah, and you know what’s funny, I was actually thinking about what you just said when I was listening to it, about all the shit that they got for doing the overdubs. But on a practical level, I think it sounds great, so how much of the fact that it is overdubbed a problem just because of the fact that people think that they are not doing it correctly? Like, 'That’s not how you should do it!' But that has got nothing to do with my personal experience with that album. I liked how it sounded. I liked how the vocals sound - the vocals are great. In fact, I am really glad that his vocals were in tune on that because it was really inspiring to me as a kid."

"If it had been the original recording, where maybe he was all out of tune and missing words or what have you. There are certain records like that. I like to listen to music on the treadmill and the day before I listened to another one of my favorite live records which is by a band from California called Fear, from early ‘80s, and the album is called Fear: Live… For the Record, and that is just completely live. What makes that so good is that is terrible! Everything’s bad! But it just had such character that, for that, it was great. I’ll be in the box for a couple of seconds and then I just wanna find those notes that are messed up, and then make them more messed up. And then put a ton of echo on them so it sounds deliberate (laughs."

Read the complete interview here. Go to this location for Townsend's complete tour schedule.