Maynard James Keenan reveals why he won’t sing certain Tool songs: “Just dumb”
Maynard James Keenan has confessed that he doesn’t want to sing some Tool songs because the lyrics “don’t hold up to scrutiny”.
The musician made the confession while starring on Steve-O’s podcast, Wilde Ride!. The host told Keenan that, when he was doing some research into Tool’s music, an AI search described their music as “reverent”.
This fact caused Keenan to scoff before adding, “Yeah, I don’t know about that… reverence for fist fucking?”. In a pointed reference to the 1996 song, ‘Stinkfist’.
The singer-songwriter went on, “There’s some old Tool songs that I don’t like playing them because I feel like I failed them.”
He added, “They’re popular songs, but I was trying to make a joke, and it was a dumb joke, and I should’ve just moved on. I feel like the lyrics don’t hold up under scrutiny.”
Referencing an example, Keenan gestured to ‘4 Degrees’ from the debut album, Undertow. He explained, “The way I wrote it… I was trying to fucking make a butt sex joke, and it was dumb.”
Nonetheless, he added as a caveat, “The song’s beautiful, what those guys did musically is great, and I think maybe the melody’s a good melody, but the words are just dumb. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking.”
In 2025, Keenan and Adam Jones admitted that their year would consist of “writing” together, as the band has not released an album since 2019’s Fear Inoculum.
In a four-and-a-half-star review of the album, Far Out observed, “In many ways, while this is TOOL’s most highly anticipated album, it will also go down as the LP that the band let loose on. They sound freer than ever to not only express themselves but to explore those expressions and find the time to manipulate, scrutinise, and develop them not just into a mesh of meddling musical layers but into enjoyable songs.”
Despite the lack of new material, the band did go on tour in 2025 throughout the US and Canada, ending with two shows in late November in Toronto.
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