In a new interview with BBC Radio 1‘s Daniel P Carter, Maynard James Keenan shed some light on the long road to Tool‘s new album Fear Inoculum.
As for why the band needed 13 years to complete it, Keenan said, “I think a lot of it is just that age where you want it to be right and we’ve had some success in the past and the fear of this thing coming out and not being accepted—the fear that it’s not as good as it can be—that can be detrimentally crippling.”
He continued: “Probably—and if I had to, you know, psychology 101, I would have to say, ‘Well yeah, that’s why it would take 13 years to write something,’ because you’re paranoid that it’s not gonna be the best that it can be and then you second guess every single step that you make, when it was probably good enough—and I shouldn’t say good enough—it was fantastic 8 years ago. But then the crippling second-guessing of yourself sets in and that psychology and that spiral you get in, it can be extremely daunting. And you can actually not even feel it happening. All of a sudden, you wake up and it’s 13 years later. The hard part is accepting the fact that maybe you’re not as important as you think you are and you should probably just get on with it.”
Find Keenan’s remarks at the 30:45 mark in the BBC’s interview, and revisit our review of Fear Inoculum here.
