Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat

According to Blabbermouth.net, Devin Townsend played his song, “The Moth,” live for the first time. “The Moth” is a rock opera. He composed the song with  Noord Nederlands Orkest (North Netherlands Symphony Orchestra). It was first played live on Thursday, March 27th, at De Oosterpoort in Groningen, Netherlands. A second performance of “The Moth” takes place tonight at the same venue. 

Townsend’s creation, “The Moth,” is a piece he’s been working on for years, collaborating with the Noord Nederlands Orkest. The song delves into the journey of human life, from birth to death, using the metaphor of a caterpillar’s transformation into a moth to explore themes of meaning and the fear of death. Inspired by grand musicals like “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Phantom of the Opera,” Townsend has spent over a decade developing this project, featuring seventy musicians, a sixty-person choir and his own band.

Townsend spoke about the song saying, “’The Moth’ is a story, I guess, about transformation, obviously, steeped in sort of existential nebulousness, which is — I don’t even know if ‘nebulousness’ is a word, but that’s kind of where I’ve been for my whole life. And when somebody said, ‘Okay, do you wanna do this ‘Moth’ project?’ At first, I had this vision of it being this kind of obscene thing, but then the more I started getting into it, the more I recognized that the format could yield unbelievably intense things. Watch different angles of the live performance below.