Devin Townsend has explained why he is touring eighteen months after announcing an indefinite break from live performance, and the explanation is money. Speaking to Niels Guns on the Sixty Scales And The Truth podcast on 29 September, he called it "Financial Armageddon".
"We lost a ton of money off of The Moth show, for a number of reasons, which we're still trying to remedy, but it's been over a year," he said. "But the company I did a lot of the work for it went bankrupt, and so we lost what our projected revenue was for that year. So I just found myself in a situation where the options for me to do other things for money just seemed limited. So I know it's not a particularly romantic notion, but it's the truth."
The Moth was the orchestral piece he performed once, in March 2025, and released this year. The film of that performance has a release date in November.
He was equally direct about the rest of the year. His dog died while he was away and he heard about it secondhand. He separated from a partner of thirty six years. The European run, which he has called the Metamorphosis tour, is him alone with an acoustic guitar, and he described it as a position with no place to hide, which has pushed him back through the catalogue looking for the patterns he does not want to repeat. "It has been an emotionally very difficult run," he said.
The tour continues through October.