Jay Weinberg has given his most direct account yet of the period following his November 2023 dismissal from SLIPKNOT, in an interview with Bryce Maopolski of HeartSupport — a nonprofit that provides free, music-based mental health support to fans.
Weinberg describes arriving at a state he could not untangle on his own. "There was a certain point that I kind of found myself as like a tangled ball of rusted barbed wire, is what it really kind of felt like emotionally," he said. What he needed, he realised, was expertise he did not have: "the ability to see life on a trajectory that brought some or that maybe quelled some anxieties and frustrations."
Finding it took time. Now based in Tennessee, Weinberg was not new to therapy — he had tried it in his early twenties while living in New Jersey and New York, and it had been "nothing that felt like a match made in heaven. It helped somewhat." Through late 2023 and into 2024 he searched again, and the breakthrough came through a close friend, the man who married him and his wife, who recommended his own therapist.
"It finally felt like an unlocking of a door," Weinberg said, "like a door that I'd tried many keys trying to open and it just wouldn't." He now speaks to a therapist once a week: "I've found that that really helps me in sorting through thoughts, sorting through those challenging things and processing events and life circumstances that are difficult to process. And when life doesn't make sense, when life is difficult to process, you feel like you're the crazy one."
The timing made it harder. Two weeks after SLIPKNOT announced he was out, Weinberg underwent an outpatient procedure to repair the torn labrum in his left hip and shave down a misshapen part of his femur — leaving him immobile at exactly the wrong moment. "I had hip surgery and was on my couch with my thoughts alone, to endure all of that concurrently was… I mean, talk about a mental and physical grind every moment of every day just to feel like a normal person."
He is careful not to present it as a finished story. "None of this is, like, 'I'm fixed and I'm all better.' I just view it as this is part of being a healthy person." He also points to the pressure that comes with the job itself — "as we do as artists, as musicians, of putting yourself on display for critique, for judgment" — and to a newer complication: he became a parent for the first time a couple of months ago.
SLIPKNOT announced on November 5, 2023 that they had "decided to make a creative decision and to part ways with Jay."