The one singer Maynard James Keenan was jealous of: “Fuck you, man!”
It’s impossible for any singer to keep their chops up for years at a time. As much as some people like to claim that all they need is a few minutes of warming up to see if their voice is concert-ready, the human voice is an instrument and should be treated as such whenever someone gets off the stage. Maynard James Keenan certainly knew how to twist his voice into different shapes, but there are always going to be a few people who were better than him who got under his skin a little bit.
But metal singing is an entirely different level of performance than any other genre. While Keenan doesn’t necessarily reach for the same high notes that people like Rob Halford do every single night, the breath control and endurance that he has to have to get through any Tool song or A Perfect Circle epic is a lot more nuanced than simply screaming into the void and hoping for the best.
It’s not like Keenan doesn’t put his body through its paces, though. Throughout his career, he has always focused on studying martial arts in his spare time, and that reliance on his breathing techniques is what takes him to whatever Zen place that he enters when screaming his way through the final piece of ‘Judith’ or the never-ending note on ‘The Grudge’. It might be easy for him to get into a pattern to keep his voice in shape, but no one’s safe from the years they put on their vocal cords.
Anyone has their few moments where their voice hasn’t been as strong as it used to, but the real professionals are the ones who use those deficiencies to their advantage. While Halford still manages to be a ‘Metal God’ with hardly any signs of age, everyone from David Lee Roth to Ozzy Osbourne needed to find ways to work around their traditional singing voice after one too many years of screaming at the top of their range.
Still, nothing prepared Keenan for hearing what Klaus Meine of Scorpions could do, saying, “Everybody’s voice is affected by ageing, with the exception of that dude from the Scorpions. Jesus Christ! That guy still hits the notes… it’s like, ‘Fuck you, man!’ Things change – so again, you have to pivot and come up with things that do work.” And listening to his voice nowadays, Meine has done everything he can to keep himself at the peak of his powers.
‘Rock You Like A Hurricane’ is not an easy song to sing, even for a decent rock and roll singer, but Meine has managed to pick his battles pretty well over the years. There are many times when he might not be operating the same way that he did back in his prime, but whether that’s throwing the mic off to the audience during parts of the show to taking the tuning down a notch, Meine always wanted to make sure that he could still hit the notes that he wanted rather than shouting for the hell of it.
The same thing could be said for Keenan half the time as well. No one writes something as complex as ‘Schism’ or ‘Lateralus’ without being able to play it onstage, and even on Tool’s most recent releases, songs like ‘7empest’ were proof that Keenan had spent those years away preserving his vocal cords for the right moment in the studio.
Because in a business that’s all about working an artist down to the bone, both Keenan and Meine know that it’s about more than being able to dominate onstage. They need to be able to be proud of what they’re able to sing, and that means doing whatever exercises get them on that stage.
