The 2006 song Maynard James Keenan called the most difficult to pull off: “You sink or swim at that point”
Maynard James Keenan has been making music since the 1980s, nurturing a nearly half-century of commitment to jamming, recording, writing, and playing live, but just like Achilles’ heel, there’s a threshold to everyone’s greatness, and his is a 2006 cut.
Like all footnotes to greatness, the secret backdoor into the hero’s psyche is always enmeshed in personal pain and suffering. For Achilles, his downfall came from his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, who dipped her infant son into the magical River Styx to make him invincible and spur him on his journey to greatness, but in holding him by the heel, the only part of his body left out of the potion, left him with a fatal chink in his bodily armour.
It may seem unlikely, but Keenan and the greatest warrior of the Trojan War share something in common: their mothers represent the point of their greatest suffering. Far from being an immortal nymph, the Tool frontman’s beloved mother, Judith Marie, suffered a stroke in 1976. She was partially paralysed and wheelchair-bound for 27 years, which is approximately 10,000 days.
The river may have poured its strength into Achilles’ body, but the roles were reversed for Keenan, who poured his life into the songs, ‘Wings for Marie (Part 1)’ and ‘10,000 Days (Wings Part 2)’, no more poignant is his reflection than in the former, where he notes, “She never lived a lie, didn’t have a life, but surely saved one”.
For Keenan, performing the emotional track live was nearly impossible to pull off; the memories of his mother were overwhelming and often overpowered his abilities as a performer. As despondency seeped in, Keenan would be forced to attempt to make it through the heartbreaking track, and he confessed in an interview with Loudwire, “I’ll never make that mistake again”.
He added, “It just took too much out of me, too much emotionally, mentally, physically, all those manifestations. Those songs were exploited and misconstrued; people were flippant and dismissive. I won’t be doing that anymore.”
Beyond the excruciating emotional confessions across the two-part track, they were also difficult to play, as if the band was attempting to drive a double-decker bus to a funeral. Keenan added, “Technically, ‘Wings’ is very difficult to pull off. If any one of us is off, it falls apart and makes that thing tragic, and that’s not a good song for me to have fall apart. It’s just too personal.”
In 2006, he wrote the song to express his grief and his agony, but he also wanted to help his fans see what he saw through the pain: Life cycles. While 10,000 years represented the time it took for his mother to succumb to her ailment, it also represents the amount of time it takes Saturn to revolve around the sun, as Keenan added, “You sink or swim at that point”.
There are plenty of new additions to the ’27 Club’ each year, and 10,000 days can contain the start, middle, and end of an entire lifetime. Keenan shared, “It was very important to start constructing songs that chronicled that process, hoping that my gift back would be to share that path and hope that I could help somebody get past that spot.”
