The following story is courtesy of Chris Harris from Noisecreep.com:

Three years ago, not long after the birth of his son, DEVIN TOWNSEND resolved to quit drinking and smoking pot. But it wasn’t easy, and now, for the first time in a long time, the former STRAPPING YOUNG LAD frontman is writing and recording music clean and sober. However, Townsend admits that, for the first year of his sobriety, he didn’t write a single note.

“For a year, nothing came out,” Townsend recalls. “So when I quit, all of a sudden, it took me a couple of years to analyze what I’d done musically in the past, and came to they conclusion that, well, a lot of that wasn’t me being a hard ass, or being a tough metal guy. A lot of it was me feeling terrified and paranoid and feeling the best way for me to repel that was to scream and yell, and no one would come to the conclusion that maybe what was underneath it was not nearly as hard as I wanted people to believe, and it took somebody who was much harder than me calling me out on it.”

Read more here.