“Going against the grain”: How a Joni Mitchell album inspired Tool
The creative process is rarely linear; often, it winds up being a jumbled mess of inspirations in fits of passion. It’s reliant on the creator having blind hope in the product, their skills, and the audience’s receptive abilities. With that, there’s everything you’ve been exposed to throughout your life that influences your work most prominently. For Tool’s Maynard James Keenan, these influences are varied and vast and evident in the work that’s been produced by the band over the years.
Keenan has referenced an array of albums, spanning from works by Black Sabbath to Devo and Pink Floyd. However, the most intriguing artist to make his list is Joni Mitchell, specifically, her work on her 1971 album, Blue. It’s an album that’s been praised by critics and audiophiles for decades due to its bright tonality, naturalistic themes, gorgeously confessional lyricism, and liberating melodic riffs. It seems an odd choice for the Tool singer and lyricist, but upon closer inspection, there’s more in common between the work behind and content of the songs on Blue and those written by Keenan than might be readily evident.
Tool’s discography is saturated with the tensely electric energy of rock, its hot-tempered and roars with a hefty dose of psychedelic and metal sounds to maintain a sense of innovation. Put simply, it’s about as far from Mitchell’s whimsical folk sound as possible. And even through this large contrast, it’s the mindset of traversing through art in unconventional ways that connects the two.
As Keenan indicates, Mitchell was always “going against the grain”. She was a woman in a male-dominated field, fulfilling all the roles to promote and create her work for herself. While Tool doesn’t face the struggle Mitchell did in the patriarchal game – building herself up in “a man’s rock world” – they have always forced themselves to be unpredictable, meaning they push themselves to evolve their sound. Where some bands will maintain a certain predictability because the formula works for them, Tool branches out sonically, keeping the interest alive for anyone involved or interested in the band.
Now, as far as the music itself is concerned, Mitchell’s influence continues. Certainly, the sonic differences stay, with Tool thriving on chaos and noise and Mitchell’s more serene development of an atmosphere. However, lyrically, both artists take on a narrative approach. Their themes may be as different as their aesthetics, but Mitchell’s affinity for detailing a dynamic landscape in her songs with her lyrics is something that shows up in Tool’s work as well.
Take ‘Disgustipated’ from their 1993 album Undertow, for example. As the longest song in the band’s discography, the song’s content serves as religious satire. It’s one of their most vividly written songs with lyrics like, “And as we descended, cries of impending doom rose from the soil / One thousand, nay a million voices full of fear / And terror possessed me then” paint a highly descriptive picture. We can also observe a song like ‘Rosetta Stoned’ from the band’s 2006 album, 10,000 Days.
The lyrics describe a character on a drug-induced trip through Area 51, which, though it’s not a topic ever tackled by Mitchell, in diction and construction is quite Mitchell-esque. It’s a bit humorous and nonsensical as Keenan sings, “And after calming me down with some / Orange slices and some fetal spooning / ET revealed to me his singular purpose”. It’s an odd comparison, but the wordy nature and clear imagery is reminiscent of Mitchell’s ‘California’ and how she throws a bit of humor, though not as absurd, into her lyrics when she sings lines like, “I’m going to see the folks I dig / I’ll even kiss a Sunset pig / California I’m coming home”.
Even though Joni Mitchell’s influence on Tool is not initially obvious, it is there. When the obscuring and domineering sonics are set aside, the folky storytelling that litters her discography comes through in Tool’s as their shared trait of invention and tenacity.
