For Jay Weinberg, the fallout from his sudden exit from Slipknot wasn’t just professional — it was a full emotional reckoning, one that eventually pushed him toward therapy as a way to regain his footing.
The drummer, dismissed from Slipknot in November 2023 after nearly a decade with the band, opened up about that period in a new interview with Bryce Maopolski, development manager at HeartSupport, a nonprofit that provides free, music-based mental health support to fans.
Describing the emotional state he found himself in, Weinberg didn’t hold back on just how disorienting the experience was.
Jay said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth): “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. And needing the expertise that I didn’t have for sure, the know-how, the ability to see life on a trajectory that brought some or that maybe quelled some anxieties and frustrations or that challenge or whatever and live a more peaceful, happy life, all of that I viewed as the center of what was gonna require untangling that rusted over ball of barbed wire. And so for myself, that took some seeking therapy, seeking a therapist here where I live in Tennessee, which took time as well. I wasn’t a complete stranger to it. In probably my early 20s when I lived on the East Coast, in New Jersey and New York, I had experience with therapy. Nothing that felt like a match made in heaven. It helped somewhat, and that was kind of a part of an experience that I had seeking it out for myself towards the end of 2023, beginning of 2024.
“And I was so thankful to have a very trusted friend,” he continued. “He married my wife and me. He’s like our closest, closest friend. So many life experiences that we’ve had and share and continue to share that I felt comfortable. It wasn’t admitting. I was on the search for trying to find — like, ‘I need the assistance of a mental health professional to help get me through this moment in my life that’s particularly challenging. And he suggested his own therapist that he trusted. And it finally felt like an unlocking of a door, like a door that I’d tried many keys trying to open and it just wouldn’t.”
Finding the right fit wasn’t instant, and Weinberg was candid about the fact that the search itself required patience. What mattered, he said, was not giving up on it.
“I think the perseverance through that was so worth it, that just because I didn’t have some kind of match made in heaven right off the bat searching for professional help in a mental health capacity, that I did, that I kept at it and that I did, and that I have someone that I speak to once a week,” Weinberg explained. “I try to stick to once a week, and 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, to make sense of. And when life doesn’t make sense, when life is difficult to process, you feel like you’re the crazy one. And it’s an ongoing process. There’s also other beautiful things that one can find challenging, like becoming a parent for the first time, which I just did a couple months ago. That brings a whole new angle to life, as I understood it would, as I had heard from so many parents before me. And so I think though it felt like a long, long search and over time recognizing the pressure that builds up over time and circumstantial pressure, for sure, the pressure of, as we do as artists, as musicians, of putting yourself on display for critique, for judgment, for all those things that being an artist, you kind of open your life up to. So I think it takes some realization of that and an admission that life… I’m okay with not being the person who just naturally has all the answers, and I sometimes need to reach out to my community, to someone I trust, to help me get through a challenging moment so I can — whatever it is — sit with my thoughts more easily, I can process event information more thoroughly and maybe with a greater degree of ease. Not like it’s a solution to everything, ’cause it doesn’t solve anything in life, but it at least eases the process through getting to the next moment.”
Complicating matters further was Weinberg‘s physical health. Just two weeks after Slipknot announced his departure, he underwent an outpatient procedure to repair a torn labrum in his left hip and correct a misshapen section of his femur — meaning he was recovering from surgery at the exact moment he was also processing the biggest professional upheaval of his career.
That overlap, he admitted, made an already difficult stretch feel almost unbearable at times.
“When you find yourself in a transitional phase, especially in my life, especially having a significant transitional phase occur at the same time as I had to have a physical surgery to correct some issues., and 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. The experience definitely taught me a lot, and continues to. 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, of tending to not just the physical rigors of what it is that I enjoy putting myself through.”
Now settled into a new chapter of his life, both personally and musically, Weinberg is careful not to frame therapy as something he “completed” or a problem he solved once and for all. Instead, he treats it as a continuing discipline — one that matters more, not less, as life throws new challenges his way.
“I enjoy the aspects of music that I love, I’ve always loved since I was a young person. But life doesn’t get less complex; I find it gets more and more complex. And things like this are just, like, you know what? This is part of the journey, is really prioritizing this so the events of life, the circumstances that you can’t control, people that surprise you, all that sort of stuff, it will test you. And so knowing that this is a part of the process of enduring that in some respects was very eye-opening, and it’s just part of my practice now.”
Weinberg joined Slipknot in 2013 as Joey Jordison‘s replacement. The band announced on November 5, 2023 that they had “decided to make a creative decision and to part ways with Jay.” Six days later he wrote on Instagram that he “was heartbroken and blindsided to receive the phone call”, adding that most people had learned of it shortly afterwards. His last show with them was on November 3, 2023 at Hell & Heaven in Toluca, Mexico, and Eloy Casagrande took the seat in February 2024. Before Slipknot he played with Against Me!, Madball and his father’s employer, Bruce Springsteen.
