Devin Townsend shares how the idea for “The Moth” first came to be in a new video

Canadian visionary musician, composer, and producer Devin Townsend discusses the idea behind his rock opera “The Moth” in a recently released video, as per Blabbermouth. “The Moth” will ultimately be released on May 29, 2026, after more than ten years of development. Over ten years ago, this 24-track album was just an idea. Devin Townsend thought of it as his “life’s work” in the back of his mind. The head of the Noord Nederlands Orkest (North Netherlands Symphony Orchestra) then made Townsend an offer to add orchestral majesty to Devin‘s vast record approximately six years ago following an acoustic performance in Amsterdam.

The original idea for ‘The Moth’, I think I could trace it back all the way to childhood. My formal musical education was a combination of things in school, like choirs and bands and all that, but also I was a child of the ’70s and the ’80s, and in that time there was a lot of musical theater that was represented in film, like ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ or ‘Phantom Of The Opera’, ‘Paint Your Wagon’, ‘West Side Story’. All these kind of musicals were just formative training for me in terms of understanding how music works. By that I mean when we watch these musicals now — another favorite was ‘Popeye’, the one with Robin Williams — when we watch them now, they just seem so overt, like just really all the emotions are so over the top, it’s so overblown and it’s maybe a little hard to connect with as an adult, but as a kid, they were essentially broad strokes of emotion. I could really see what happy looked and sounded like. I could see what sadness looked and then consequently sounded like. And so between that and things like ‘Star Wars’ or ‘The Dark Crystal’, it was a way for me to sort of get a sort of an informal musical education in what these types of music represented on an emotional level. I remember with ‘Star Wars’, for example, the idea of the sand people and all those sort of musical motifs that were going into that sort of desert planet. I didn’t know at the time, but it was very sort of Stravinsky-esque. And so having had those opportunities as a young child to sort of absorb all that musical information from what it looked and what it consequently sounded like from way back at that point, I remember making a conscious decision. I was, like, ‘I want to do that.’

The reason why it’s happened now rather than earlier on in my career is I just didn’t have the vocabulary in order to articulate these things in a real practical way. When we had done ‘Deconstruction’, I had worked with orchestras, when we had done — well, a lot of it, even Casualties [Of Cool project with Ché Aimee Dorval] I’d worked with orchestras and choirs, but I lacked the vocabulary in order to articulate my needs in an efficient way. So the past 10 years has not only been conceptualizing of this next direction in my musical journey, but also it’s like an apprenticeship in a way. I had to learn how to speak this language. I had to find the people to help with it, and I also had to find the team to be able to put these things together in a way that was in line with my original vision for this type of musical work. So, convoluted, but here we are.