Devin Townsend Shares Brutally Honest Hindsight

(Metal Hammer) Devin Townsend says that taking drugs when he was younger made him think he was God. The musician and producer says he began taking acid and mushrooms following his work on Steve Vai's 1993 album Sex & Religion and brief stint in the UK with The Wildhearts the following year.

Townsend tells Metal Hammer: "There's a predisposition toward mental health issues in my family. I had a fairly sheltered childhood, and then I moved to LA to do the Steve Vai thing and moved to the UK to do The Wildhearts thing, and so there were a lot of experiences in a short space of time.

"When I moved back to Vancouver, I decided that, 'Now is the time to start doing acid!' I remember the first time I got really high on mushrooms, and I thought, 'Well, clearly I'm God!' Now I know that everyone feels like that, but at the time I felt like I was the first person to ever experience that, so I had to write a series of albums about it and do interviews about it.

He adds: "Note to self, it really labels you in hindsight as being a little bit of a f***-up, you know what I mean?" Townsend says he was on anti-psychotic medication for 10 years. He decided to visit a psychiatrist when he and his wife had children to help overcome substance abuse.

He says: " I said to myself, 'I don't know if I'm actually mentally ill in the ways that I've been told, or if I was just on a ton of drugs.'" Read more here.

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