But I'm a hot-blooded Italian by nature. Whatever the situation you present, I'm going to make something out of it.
— Maynard James Keenan
I've always had an affinity for growing things.
But you know, I'm the negative-Nancy, curmudgeon, glass-half-empty-with-a-leak-in-it guy - which is basically the fuel that fires me up anyway. Without that, we wouldn't have me.
Actually I never did stand up. I'm not that funny.
I'm a pessimist. But I'm a pessimist with a sense of responsibility.
I believe that music is a force in itself. It is there and it needs an outlet, a medium. In a way, we are just the medium.
Shows are really strange. Sometimes you really don't know what to expect.
Music is about listening, the more you play, the more the magic spreads.
Everything we release with Tool is inspired by our music.
But then it hasn't really been a focus of our government to make us an educated people.
Nowadays, you have to sell, like, half a million or a million records just to break even.
I can't be a legend yet. I'm not dead.
I'm a lot easier to work with now than I have been in the past, for sure.
The idea is, if I can't heal from my art, then how can you heal?
There were a lot of choices to make and I always picked artist. I never once picked doctor, lawyer, firemen or something like that. It was always artist.
Most religious stories and mythologies have some sort of similar root, some sort of global archetypes.
A circle is the reflection of eternity. It has no beginning and it has no end - and if you put several circles over each other, then you get a spiral.
A lot of people into Tool, for some reason, are not interested in humor.
Reading is more of a left-brain process, and listening to music is a right-brain function.
Yeah, because I think it's more important just to inspire people to wake up one day and pick up a book and start feeling it out for themselves.
Prescott National Forest is right on the edge of my home in Arizona.
The record company's worst fear is that you'll fall in love or get rich.
We're just four guys and we are enjoying what we're doing with Tool.
And if you don't live, you have nothing to write about.
Everything revolves around the music when it comes to Tool.
If the education of our kids comes from radio, television, newspapers - if that's where they get most of their knowledge from, and not from the schools, then the powers that be are definitely in charge, because they own all those outlets.
I think people in general have neglected to learn about history.
There is still a future with music, because people want music.
I would hope they would be our fellow artists, rather than trying to emulate or idolize clowns like us.
Because as an only child, you have your own little world.
Because artists can be extremely eccentric and insane, and unfortunately, the people they hurt the most are the people that are closest to them.
I always knew that I wanted to be an artist.
If you take different mythologies from different cultures, the names may change and the story lines may vary but there is always something in common.
We're five people, five individuals who came together to create something, to make music and to complete each other musically, to form a perfect circle.
One of the challenges we set up for 'Puscifer' was to come up with a core identity and see how far we can push it.
You know, I grew up listening to Joni Mitchell.
Actors have these delicate appendages called Egos.
People have to follow their hearts, and if their hearts lead them to Wal-Mart, so be it.
Once you take yourself too seriously the art will suffer.
After all, in today's music scene every band seems to steal from other bands.
For me, life is writing and I can do it anywhere. It doesn't matter where I am. I listen. I write. I live.
Adam does most of the work when it comes to videos and he basically does the same as I do with the lyrics. The videos are his visual interpretations of our music.
Just in general, any government throughout history hasn't really wanted its people to be educated, because then they couldn't control them as easily.
I see a lot of patterns in our behavior as a nation that parallel a lot of other historical processes.
I think everything Joni Mitchell did for music was big.
I just hope that our fans are people who are inspired by music, and just use our music as a background or inspiration for whatever it is they do.
I think the biggest problem working with me would be that I'm an only child, and so I have an internal dialogue that goes on that I just assume you can hear.
I always knew that I wanted to be creative, that I wanted to create something.
I think the media made Manson, turned him into some larger than life figure and surrounded him with mystery and some shady glamour.
A lot of names in America and Europe have their roots in Latin and Greek words. A lot of them go back to archetypes and their stories.
