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Slipknot’s Clown Says He Needs Heart Surgery After Feeling Like He’s “Dying”
Slipknot’s Clown says he needs heart surgery after a recent tour, revealing he sometimes feels like he’s dying.
Shawn “Clown” Crahan has said he needs heart surgery, and the Slipknot percussionist admits the warning signs have been hard to ignore. In a new appearance on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast, the 56-year-old musician said there are moments when he feels like he is “dying.”
Crahan, the Iowa band’s last remaining founding member, said the issue surfaced after the group’s most recent tour. As reported by ThePRP, he explained: “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 the scene got serious enough that medical staff briefly feared he might be having a heart attack. “I kind of fell asleep and I woke up. I’m like, ‘Are you going to get this thing?’ 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, and joked that it could have been a convenient way to get out of touring. Instead, doctors told him it would make life easier. “I was like, I can’t get out of this to save my life,” he joked. “I’m like, there is nothing, not even my heart. It’s going to be better because of Slipknot.”
Last month, Slipknot finally put out the long-rumoured Look Outside Your Window for Record Store Day 2026. The album had been teased since 2019 as a set of “experimental, psychedelic” outtakes, even though the music itself was recorded around 2008 and had already become a point of fixation for fans.
In 2024, Clown told NME he was glad to finally have the project out of his hands. “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 later gave the record four stars, 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.”
Elsewhere, former drummer Jay Weinberg recently said his exit from Slipknot “remains confusing,” and said his “world bottomed out from under him” as a result.
