Korn released Issues in the United States on November 16, 1999, through Immortal and Epic Records. Their fourth studio album included “Falling Away from Me,” but Jonathan Davis faced a different challenge behind the microphone: making an album sober for the first time.
Davis described that adjustment to Double J in 2018. Around the Family Values tour, he had been struggling with depression and anxiety; getting clean left him confronting feelings without the drugs and alcohol that had accompanied his earlier work. He considered Issues a concept record about that transition and the effort to find himself within it. Sobriety hadn’t immediately made the writing easier. It had changed the conditions under which he worked, leaving him to learn how to create without the substances he had relied on to lower his inhibitions.
The band also changed the structure around the recording. In Jon Wiederhorn’s Loudwire account, the other members began writing in early 1999, rehearsed the material with Davis in June and started recording with Brendan O’Brien in July. Guitarist James “Munky” Shaffer credited the producer with keeping them moving. “He’s a workhorse and we needed someone like that to motivate us,” Shaffer told Wiederhorn in 1999. That discipline didn’t mean abandoning the band’s identity: Shaffer described the goal as making strong material that remained recognizably Korn. Recording took the group from A&M Studios in Hollywood to Atlanta, where they finished the album.
O’Brien also became Davis’ partner in the shorter pieces between the full songs. In a Kerrang! interview first published in 2020, Davis recalled playing drums while O’Brien handled keyboards. They nicknamed their collaboration Tron, after instruments such as the Mellotron and Orchestron. Davis linked the interludes to the thoughts running through his head during the period, giving those experiences a place alongside the loops and synthesizer textures they were adding.
The sequencing makes room for those smaller pieces from the start. “Dead,” the brief opening track with bagpipes, comes before “Falling Away from Me.” Alongside the full-length songs “Make Me Bad” and “Somebody Someone,” the album repeatedly returns to short interludes. Heard through Davis’ description of the sessions, those interruptions become part of the story he was telling.
Korn introduced “Falling Away from Me” through a very different setting: South Park. The band appeared as animated versions of themselves in the show’s October 1999 episode “Korn’s Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery.” Davis recalled that the musicians voiced their own characters and had to record their dialogue twice after equipment failed to capture the first attempt.
Fans helped determine the album’s visual identity, too. Davis recalled all five members sorting through roughly 30,000 artwork submissions, repeatedly narrowing the piles until they chose the ragdoll design. A fan’s illustration became the face of a record built around the singer’s difficult adjustment to sobriety.
Issues debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. MTV’s contemporary report put its first-week U.S. sales above half a million copies.
