How three songs come together to reveal Tool’s hidden track
Most people, when forced to do cross country at school, spend the time cursing every second of it and hoping that it’s over. Tool’s Maynard James Keenan was different, though, as while he was running, he was getting insight into his future music career, as he realised his breathing pattern was different compared to the others around him.
“I remember running cross country in high school, and everyone has their own breathing rhythms. It’s just supposed to be in out, right?” he said, “But I found myself running when I was in high school, and I had odd rhythms, it wasn’t just in-out-in-out rhythm, I was actually running to the steps. So if you’re going over hill or downhill, in chuckholes or whatever, my breath would follow those rhythms, which is weird.”
He didn’t just chalk it off as an odd character trait, though; he realised he just thought in different time signatures than a lot of other people. When listening to music, he would connect with artists like Pink Floyd and Joni Mitchell, who wrote in different tempos from 4/4. As such, when he started making music himself, it shouldn’t be a surprise that it came in various alternating time signatures.
“Odd time signature stuff. There’s some Joni Mitchell stuff that has crazy time signatures […] She’s singing on the up, she’s singing on the down, and that was kind of like the running,” he said, “Some of the Pink Floyd stuff, some King Crimson, a lot of those rhythms, I think. So, I think just naturally it’s easier for me to write to things that are outside of 4/4.”
Tool fans are constantly surprised by the band’s ingenuity. The way that they write in strange time signatures is one thing, and it would be seen as a huge accomplishment by other bands, but Tool doesn’t stop there. With every new song and album, they look for different ways to surprise their listeners, and they did that on their 10,000 Days album by recording a hidden track on there.
Many different artists have included hidden tracks on their albums. They usually appear after songs. When fans wait long enough after the last track on an album, the hidden song then reveals itself. Some people do it for fun, and other people do it because they feel pressure to put the song on the album, but aren’t huge fans of it.
Bruce Springsteen famously did this with his song ‘The Way’, which he couldn’t stand listening to. “The main reason it’s hidden is because I never liked it,” said Springsteen, “I would like to see it placed in a David Lynch film over a sexually perverse scene. That, to me, is its righteous home.”
As Tool have become famous for, though, they took things to another level with their hidden track. Rather than just record a regular song and leave it in a corner of a record, Tool decided to record three separate songs in a way where, if they’re layered on top of one another, they make an entirely new track. It sounds impossible, but so do a lot of Tool’s ideas.
On their album 10,000 Days, you need to layer the songs ’10,000 Days, ‘Viginti Tres’ and ‘Wings for Marie’, in doing so, you create an entirely new song which is laced with atmosphere and a great listen. Listen to the hidden song in its entirety below.
