19 Years Ago: Korn Dropped ‘Take a Look in the Mirror’

After nearly two years of collaboration with meticulous producer Michael Beinhorn on their 2002 album Untouchables, Korn made the decision to rush the production of their sixth studio album, 2003’s Take a Look in the Mirror, and rely more on the spontaneity and irrationality that had driven them in their formative years.

Frontman Jonathan Davis produced the album at his home studio in Tarzana, California, recording the majority of it between April and June 2003 in order to avoid a protracted relationship with another well-known producer. 

“Before that album, we had done all this shit with huge budgets and all this work with different producers and all these people, and some of us had gotten really into meth and other stuff and we were so bummed for all these different reasons,” Davis told me. “We were like, ‘You know, fuck this. Let’s just do an album really quickly and get back to how we used to do things.’ So we produced the album ourselves and put the shit out.”

Korn included a new rendition of “Alive,” which had previously only been on the tape that got them signed, Niedermayer’s Mind, in line with the sentiment of going back to their roots. The mood of the song served as the foundation for the album, which was louder and harder than Untouchables and contained more dense, surging seven-string riffs than were counterbalanced by cleaner, more atmospheric segues. Because the band wrote many of the songs while on tour for Untouchables, the singles “Did My Time” and “Right Now” had elements of Life is Peachy and Korn.

“I had my bus, with a studio on it, and an engineer that would come out and set up the writing rooms every day,” Davis said. “We sold out the old Wembley Arena in London the first time we played it. We sold that motherfucker clean out, and right after the show we all went in and started writing music. None of us were partying, we just wanted to write music. We did the same thing at Madison Square Garden. Sold that bitch out, and right back to writing. We wrote a ton of music, and then we wanted to record right.”

After finishing the tour cycle, the band worked in Davis’ home studio with Beinhorn’s engineer, Frank Filipetti. “We worked together really well,” Davis said. “We did it quick like we used to and the title says it all. Take a look in the mirror. We had all gone on this big rock star trip and we wanted to strip it back and take it back to the way we used to do things and get some of that excitement. My assistant [Jim] ‘Bud’ [Monti] was the engineer on there because my other assistant Pebble bailed. But we just went with it and put that bitch out and everybody liked that a lot.”

Take a Look in the Mirror contained a collaboration with rapper Nas called “Play Me” in addition to some classic nu-metal and a few standout hits. When they performed Untouchables in its entirety at the album release party at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York, Korn and Nas met backstage. Despite the fact that the two artists were on opposite sides of the country when they recorded the song, they grew close, and their chemistry is audible.

“I had ISDN lines in my studio,” Davis explained. “There was a datafax and he was in a studio in New York and we were connected through this special line. We did the whole thing in real time, which is no big deal today, but back in 2003 that was pretty ahead of its time. So Nas is rapping about people taking advantage and I was just like, ‘Play me. Yeah, that’s it. You wanna play me?’ That was the shit. I love that guy. He’s the man.”

Take a Look in the Mirror was able to preserve the essence of Korn’s early work, but the album didn’t receive the same response from the band’s followers as its predecessors. The sole song on the album that Korn still performs is “Right Now,” but it earned poor reviews and went platinum less than a month after it was released.