SLIPKNOT has selected “Goodbye” as the next single from its Grammy-nominated new album, “.5: The Gray Chapter”. The track will impact rock radio this winter.

A sentimental hard-rock ballad, “Goodbye” pays reverent homage to SLIPKNOT‘s fallen bassist Paul Gray, who passed away in May 2010 from an accidental overdose of drugs. The song’s chorus goes, “A long time ago, we believed that we were united / So the last thing on earth I’m ready to do is say goodbye.” When SLIPKNOT percussionist Shawn “Clown” Crahan first heard it, he interpreted it to mean that the band’s, singer Corey Taylor, who wrote the lyrics, was quitting. “That’s how emotional we all were,” the percussionist told Rolling Stone magazine. “You never know when someone’s just gonna throw their arms up and go, ‘I’m done.'”

Taylor told Rolling Stone that “Goodbye” was written “about the day we lost Paul. It’s specifically about sitting in my house two hours after we found out, just shell-shocked, completely numb and then completely overwhelmed with what we were dealing with. It’s a heavy tune, and it’s on a whole other level for this band.”

SLIPKNOT guitarist Jim Root told Australia’s TheMusic.com.au about “Goodbye”: “I love the ambience of ‘Goodbye’. I get to get really RADIOHEAD with my guitar playing and pretend that I’m Johnny Greenwood [RADIOHEAD guitarist] or something. You know what I mean? It makes you think outside of the box from a quote-unquote standard metal guitar player and you get to search for more ambient sounds. That song’s pretty organic too. The bass that’s on that record is actually the bass that Corey played on the demo. We just left it because it had a kind of vibe to it. There’s no sense in trying to beat it.”

SLIPKNOT is nominated in both “Best Rock Album” (“.5: The Gray Chapter”) and “Best Metal Performance” (“Custer”) categories at the 58th annual Grammy Awards, which will be held on February 15, 2016 at Staples Center in Los Angeles and broadcast on CBS at 8 p.m. ET.

“.5: The Gray Chapter” sold 132,000 copies in the U.S. in its first week of release to land at No. 1 on The Billboard 200 chart.

SLIPKNOT will begin a European tour on January 18 in Helsinki, Finland.

Fonte: Blabbermouth.net