Marilyn Manson Shows His Vulnerable Side

"I did it in one day, two takes, and played it for a few people. One person cried, and I realized that I was able to make somebody that I knew feel something. And it made me kind of redefine and lessen my insane schizophrenic moments -- who I am and what my life is about, the separation of Brian Warner from Marilyn Manson, 'Are you this or are you that?' "

He says: "When I'm on stage, I share -- I don't know if that's the word, it sounds a little hippie -- I put out all my personal feelings to strangers. Offstage, I wanted to do the same things to people I know, but I felt like I was failing, couldn't make the people I know understand what I was feeling. So I started writing songs for the people that I knew instead of the people I don't know, which is the opposite of what I've done my whole life."

The album features the smoldering dirge "If I Was Your Vampire" as well as "Putting Holes in Happiness," "Mutilation Is the Most Sincere Form of Flattery" and the dark valentine "Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand)." The Cleveland Plain Dealer's John Soeder trumpeted, "Goths, behold the make-out album of the year, maybe of the decade." Manson told Rolling Stone that "if I had to do a record review, I'd say it's got a cannibal consumption, obsessive, violent-sex, romance angle, but with an upbeat swing to it."

"It was very vulnerable in a way I wasn't intentionally trying to be," he says from L.A. "I don't regret it, but if I was understanding that when it happened, I might have been afraid to do it. It was something I had to do, and as melodramatic as it sounds, it was really the thing that made me driven to have hope.

"People have always misinterpreted me as being nihilistic, and I understand that, but there's a difference between having nothing to believe in and being angry about what's going on in the world," Manson says. "If you're putting something into the world, you have to care about the world, as much as you may dislike it. If you're a nihilist, you're not going to be an artist."

Manson gives much of the credit to bassist-guitarist Tim Skold, who created the music to his lyrics. "With 'Car Crash,' I realized that the music sounded like how I felt. It might be more Tim scoring what he saw me going through than him just being in tune with what I wanted. This is the first time in any album that I did not have to tell the person who was writing with me where to go."

And, Manson adds, it was something that "ultimately translated to my personal life, where I started allowing myself to give in to trust, to trusting people in a different way, and it ended up being fun at an awful time in my life. It was rather strange that in the worst period that I can remember, I was able to make something that I enjoyed."

Maybe that explains some of Manson's playfulness at the start of the conversation, a willingness to subvert his startling image (the razor-thin goth ghoul, blackness of hair and whiteness of skin often set off with blood-red lipstick) and shock-the-conservatives-and-Christians reputation as the great corrupter of American youth.

Now, after eight weeks in Europe, Manson will hit the road on a co-headlining bill with Slayer, his first stateside jaunt since 2004's Against All Gods tour. (They perform Monday at Merriweather Post Pavilion.) When it ends in late November, he'll get back to work on "Phantasmagoria," which will feature Tilda Swinton, Lily Cole and Wood, already Manson's co-star in a controversial video for "Heart-Shaped Glasses" shot using "stereoscopic" 3-D technology developed by "Titanic" director James Cameron.

The eight-minute video kicks off with 2 1/2 minutes of the near-naked Manson and Wood in a passionate, and loud, make-out session, cuts to them driving a Corvette down a dark highway doing unsafe things with Polaroid cameras and a steak knife, segues to a blood-drenched bedroom scene and ends with them driving their flame-engulfed 'Vette off a cliff a la "Thelma & Louise."

The video begins with a warning for viewers younger than 16, and there are edited versions for commercial television (and, reportedly, a raunchier one for a future DVD). The controversy has come over Wood's orgiastic performance (hey, she is an actress) and the sheer "Lolita"-ishness of it all. Manson has said the song was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov's notorious pedophilic novel, and Wood made her name at 15 in "Thirteen," playing a 13-year-old discovering sex, drugs and rock-and-roll.

"To me it's very unoffensive, it's almost PG -- there's no nudity," Manson says. "I just wanted to make something that conveyed the sentiment of the song and was more romantic in a dark way. If I wanted to be offensive, it could have really been offensive."

Marilyn Manson and Slayer Appearing Monday at Merriweather Post Pavilion Alice or malice?: In Marilyn Manson's "Phantasmagoria," author Lewis Carroll's wife will be played by the beautifully odd Tilda Swinton, who has said her very evil White Witch in "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" was "very Marilyn Manson-inspired." There will be two Alices: Alice Liddell, the child who inspired the "Alice in Wonderland" stories, will be played by fashion model Lily Cole, while Evan Rachel Wood will portray the girl who played Alice in the first stage production of the work, a particularly traumatic experience for Carroll, according to his diaries. "I did so much research," says Manson, describing Carroll as a fractured soul: "a guy who's deaf in his right ear and he's left-handed . . . a mathematician who's also into writing -- a very serious left side, right side of the brain, split-personality situation. Researching 19th-century medicine, he would have been diagnosed as having aphasia, which probably someone would diagnose me as having, too. But I think you can turn lemons into lemonades."