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Slipknot’s Clown says he needs heart surgery and sometimes feels like he’s dying
Slipknot’s Shawn “Clown” Crahan says he needs heart surgery and sometimes feels like he’s dying after recent health checks.
Shawn “Clown” Crahan has said he needs heart surgery, revealing that there are times when he “feel[s] like” he is “dying.”
The Slipknot percussionist, 56, made the comments during a recent appearance on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast. Crahan, the Iowa band’s last remaining founding member, said the need for cardio surgery became clear after his last tour.
As he told ThePRP: “I have a skipping heart and I got to get a surgery. And I found this out after my last tour. I went in, I wasn’t feeling good, and I went in and the nurse was trying to get an EKG thing going on me or whatever and it just wasn’t happening.”
He said he briefly fell asleep before waking up and asking whether the test had been completed. “And she’s like, ‘Oh, it’s not working.’ They thought I was having a heart attack right there. Anyway, my heart skips and apparently, I’ve taught myself to be like a cross-country runner.”
Crahan added that he had been “overweight,” but said his brain is “so strong” that it keeps his heart rate at 43 during the day. “It hasn’t happened since I’ve been here with you, which is good, because I’ll go from ‘on,’ to just straight up I feel like I’m dying. So, I got to get a surgery. It’s a very easy surgery. You’re usually out on the same day. It’s not like they rip you open. This is something about the electricity.”
He also said he once thought he might need a pacemaker, joking that it could have been a way to stop touring with the band. Doctors, he said, told him it would actually make life easier. “I was like, I can’t get out of this to save my life,” he said. “I’m like, there is nothing, not even my heart. It’s going to be better because of Slipknot.”
Last month, Slipknot released the long-rumoured Look Outside Your Window as part of Record Store Day 2026. The material had been teased since 2019 as a collection of “experimental, psychedelic” outtakes, with the songs recorded around 2008 and long discussed by fans.
In 2024, Crahan told NME he was glad to finally be done with the project: “I’m really pleased about it and happy to finally be rid of it! What’s nice though is that it isn’t a hype thing, it’s just something we did while we were doing other Slipknot albums. It was a very honest action to make music that wasn’t Slipknot, but utilised the skills of guys with no rules. I don’t know if it’s ‘good’, but I know that I love it. I make music for myself, but I hope that the people who waited and waited and waited think it was worth it too.”
NME gave the album four stars in its review, writing: “We always knew ‘Look Outside Your Window’ was going to be experimental. It’s Taylor’s desolate voice, over the knee-jerk intersection of heaviness and atmosphere, that fills it with the Slipknot fear factor, something normally summoned through masks and unrelenting brutality. ‘Look Outside Your Window’ wouldn’t exist without The Nine, and its unanswered mystery can finally be resolved, confirmed in their story as a seriously impressive cult classic.”
In other Slipknot news, former drummer Jay Weinberg recently said his departure from the band “remains confusing,” adding that his “world bottomed out from under him” because of it.
