Devin Townsend has explained why he took a dump in Steve Vai’s guitar case during his time as the virtuoso’s lead singer.
Townsend – now a prog metal polymath known for his eclectic solo career, plus his work with Strapping Young Lad, the Devin Townsend Project and more – came to prominence as Vai’s vocalist on 1993’s Sex & Religion album and the subsequent arena tour supporting Aerosmith.
Talking to the Heavy Stories podcast, the Canadian singer/multi-instrumentalist says that he laid the cable in the guitar great’s case as a way to express his discontent in the role, as he found himself singing lyrics that he couldn’t relate to.
“With Steve, I was only 19 or 20 when I met him, so that petulant part of my personality was in full bloom, right?” he says. “When I got there, he was like, ‘I want you to sing these lyrics: sing this song, which is about my wife giving birth, and this song, which is about my experience with this.’
“And I remember, at the time, just being like, ‘Man, I can’t!’ He’s like, ‘No, really give it on that line! This is the line where you really gotta reach for the heavens!’, and I’m just like, ‘But it doesn’t mean anything to me.’
“I remember reflecting on that experience as being so fundamentally in opposition to how I learned how to write that it wasn’t that I considered it to be wrong, necessarily – and it isn’t wrong, necessarily – but I reacted to it in such a way as a kid that everything in my nature was just like, ‘No!’”
When asked if taking a squat over Vai’s case was an “act of protest”, he replies, “When you can’t articulate your discontent in a way that is able to be understood in a sitdown environment, I guess you’re left with only the shitting option.”
He adds: “I was too young to articulate it in any way that was rational. At that point, it was a culmination of a lot of circumstances, like arrogance, fame and confusion and relationships. All that stuff. I can forgive myself in hindsight for the ways I reacted at the time because I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to respond. I was lost, right? And I responded to it by creating Strapping.”
Townsend joined Vai’s band through Relativity Records, who were then releasing the guitarist’s music and had just signed Townsend’s short-lived solo project, Noisescapes. In a 1993 interview with Guitar World, Townsend admitted to joining Vai’s band simply “because it was there”.
“It’s like cuttin’ your balls off if you can do something and you don’t, you know what I mean?” he explained. “When people ask me, ‘Why did you do the Vai thing?’, it’s like, ‘Because it was there.’ I had no intentions of joining a band. I didn’t even hear the Vai music until the day before we recorded.”
Even though Townsend was seemingly quite unhappy during his stint with Vai, the two have retained a friendly relationship. Vai appeared on Townsend’s 2019 album Empath as well as The Moth: a multimedia symphonic metal opera that Townsend released in May, following almost 10 years of buildup. He offered a suitably scatological description of the creative process during a recent interview with Prog, saying, “It feels like I’ve been taking a 10-year shit, and I’m just wiping now.”
Townsend will embark on a solo acoustic European tour in September: his first run of shows since he announced a live hiatus in May 2025. Meanwhile, Vai is currently making his way across Europe and will perform at the legendary Pompeii Amphitheatre in Italy tonight (July 2).
Listen to the full podcast interview with Townsend below:
