“A difficult puzzle”: The song Maynard James Keenan is most proud of
Maynard James Keenan is a man of many talents; not only has he helped to elevate an area of rock with unrivalled complexity thanks to his work with Tool, A Perfect Circle, and Puscifer, but he chiefly considers himself a vintner rather than a songwriter. In truth, it is perhaps this slight arms-length approach that has allowed him to flourish creatively; he remains distant enough from the melodrama of music to play around with it.
But that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t sincerely care about his work. But, much like wine-making, he sees it as a craft—something that you work at and devote hours to rather than the ‘divine inspiration’ virtue that many claim to attest to. So, much like the palate of his pinots, he craves a complex flavour in his music—depth that showcases all the hours, expertise and love that went into it. He’s even happy to berate his own fans when he thinks that has gone underappreciated.
When BBC Radio asked him what song he was most proud of, he once again showcased how happy he was to go against the grain and appraise his own efforts without any prejudice. So, rather than opt for a track by Tool or A Perfect Circle, as you might expect, he went with an effort from his lesser-known act, Puscifer.
“I feel like it’s one of the few tracks that’s actually capturing landscape and soundscape altogether, and a difficult puzzle to put together ’cause it wasn’t easy to put all those elements vocally together,“ the songwriter said of the 2015 track ‘Grand Canyon’. “To really make it work, it was very clunky. If you heard some of the early versions of it, what we we’re trying to do, it was like ‘Oh, bench this thing. It’s not working’,“ he added.
That sort of musical challenge has always been something he has adored. But it wasn’t always a song he anticipated being proud of, explaining, “It really took a long time to kind of… The first initial attacks were like ‘This is a disaster. Like no wait, no it’s not. Move this part over to here, move this part over to here’ like now it measures up. Now the soundscape and the landscape starts to unveil.”
In the end, it captured the sort of dusky wine-region aesthetic that Keenan is naturally drawn towards. The musical topography of the track undulates like the rolling hills of the Napa Valley. “We were trying to see through a lot of haze and a lot of fog for the end piece. So it took a little bit of cleaning up and patience to get through that one,” he said. However, he admits that the mirage of the process was fitting for the swirling final result. They might have honed it down to a clear piece of music, but it still has the hallmarks of its hazy beginnings—the glitchy production adding to the sense of ebb and flow.
In Puscifer, Keenan has full control over the project, and the six-minute epic of ‘Grand Canyon’ typifies his look at songwriting. The Money $hot track has a pulsing energy, but the sweet guitar chimes in with a lightness to create something adjacent to desert rock but, ultimately, entirely unique to Keenan. He then lays down a wavering topline vocal melody that proves captivating. The result is something he’s so proud of; it eclipses anything he has done with his other outfits.
