Publication: Muchmusic Spotlight
Date: August, 2001
Transcribed by
MrPhilosopher (menosist@wongfaye.com)
MrPhilosopher (menosist@wongfaye.com)
page: title: author: (Opening scene) Formed in LA, California in 1990 Maynard James Keenan formed APC with guitarist Billy Howedel while still in Tool Latest album 'Lateralus' released May 2001 (Tool hanging around a tree in 1993) MJK: It's really important to have the 4 of us in a situation locking into a certain musical, you know, thing, an emotion, a feeling and taking it as far as we can by listening to each other. It's more important for us to reach ourselves with our music. I think if we get to that point then we can reach other people and it's going to translate. (Hush video is played with weird crash and beeping sounds over the swearing) (Maynard by himself in Feb. 1994) MJK: The music should always come first, you know if, uh, if the words were so important, you know, and the music wasn't the people would be doing sold out spoken word tours and music would be secondary, but there not. People are going because the music is what carries all the emotion. My words just kind of define where the emotion is coming from. And in some cases when you get a record and it deals with the subject matter that we deal with, people ignore the music and go straight to the lyrics, and that puts more focus on me and I'm only one-fourth of this project…if that. (sober video is played) (Tool around the tree again in 1993) MJK: We've all dabbled in art backgrounds and if you have an extensive art background, something that falls into that is you're going to run into teachers that, you know, bring up mythology and a lot of psychology and stuff like that, so that ends up coming into play. There's a lot of philosophy that goes into the images behind the art work. So there's a lot of background in all our backgrounds, music and visual art. (a clip of tool playing live at Concert Hall, Toronto in 1994. Maynard has a pretty nasty haircut. It's kinda like a mohawk) (MJK by himself again in 1994) MJK: I think most of us grew up in a pretty sterile environment, everything is pretty much peaches and cream and flowers. Everythings nice, ignore all the bad stuff. And the world's just not like that, and I think that the sooner people get to the point that the ugly stuff is just as real as the beautiful stuff, that it goes hand in hand, then we can go on evolving. (stinkfist video is played) (MJK by himself in 1997) MJK: People that assume that we're hateful don't understand that hate and anger are 2 completely separate energies. They might have a similar emotional charge to them but anger is a much more constructive emotion then hate, and that's what we're all about: the anger. Not all our music, I'm just saying that particular element that people see in it, the aggressive nature, the emotional or angry nature of it. And in conjunction with the more compassionate stuff. There's a lot of light at the end of the tunnel in our music but you have to make an effort to purge yourself through the music to see it. (clip of APC video "Judith" with writing at the bottom "Keenan took some time off from Tool to work on a side project, A Perfect Circle") (MJK with wig on sitting beside Billy in April 2000) MJK: It's more in my nature to work under parameters. I do really well when you give me parameters. I take what's there and I work with it. Even with Tool I hardly ever came up with the original core structure, it always ended up being…I'm just kind of reacting to what we're doing in the room. I don't…very rarely do I bring in the original riff and start from there. I'm much more of a reactive artist then a creative one. (schism video is played) (MJK with funky glasses being interviewed by Sook-yin Lee in April 2001) SYL: Do you ever get a sense of what your role in life is? What your purpose is to be in this lifetime? MJK: Uh, No…I think that's the cool part, cause I'm always changing my mind about what that is. I'm still not sure that it's even music. It's just what I'm doing now. THE END
Posted to t.d.n: 08/30/01 21:55:36