The Tool song Maynard James Keenan sorely regrets: “It was kind of a dick joke”
Maynard James Keenan was never going to be a musician who opted to write easy songs. He was always keen on pushing his limits creatively.
Ever since he was young, Keenan realised that he didn’t do things in regular time signatures. His discovery of as much didn’t even begin in music, but when he used to run track in high school. While he would run alongside his classmates, he realised that his breathing was off, not due to any fitness issues, but rather as the result of his inbuilt metronome ticking ever so slightly differently.
“I remember running cross country in high school, and everyone has their own breathing rhythms. It’s just supposed to be in-out, right?” said the Tool frontman. “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.”
From that moment on, Keenan would immerse himself in the world of unusual time signatures. By listening to the work of people like Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd and King Crimson, he was able to better understand how you can make music which strays outside of the classic 4/4 time you usually hear, but that also remains accessible to the average listener.
Of course, Tool’s innovation within music doesn’t stop with the strange timings they use, there is a lot more to it than that. The band have seemingly been able to push the boundaries of prog rock with every single record that they release, constantly adapting different writing styles and blowing listeners’ minds in the process.
One of their songs, which is frequently celebrated for its innovation, is the track ‘Lateralus’, where the band have embraced both the Fibonacci sequence and the Phi ratio in a way that no musician previously has, allowing it to dictate an ever-changing time signature and have influence over the number of syllables in the words that make up different lyrics.
The sequence consists of the numbers: zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, and 13, using these when helping to write the lyrics to the song, as they will use a word or phrase with one syllable, then another with one, then with two, then with three, and so on and so on, which sounds near enough impossible, doesn’t it? But the word impossible doesn’t mean a whole lot to a musician like Maynard James Keenan.
Perhaps the biggest testament to the band’s ingenuity isn’t the fact that they have managed to write a song using such techniques, rather, it’s the fact that Keenan felt they sold themselves short by doing so. By using the numbers to help dictate the lyrics, Keenan believed he made the song a bit too easy to understand, and he would have rather taken a more complex approach. Most other musicians would write a song like this and wear it as a badge of honour for centuries, and yet it remains one tinged with regret for Keenan.
“The song ‘Lateralus’ with the Fibonacci thing. I feel like I kind of pulled a very pedestrian, sophomore move by including those numbers. Because in general, music is the Phi ratio. Everything, all nature, all these things we talk about, it’s already here,” he explained.
Concluding, “By pointing it out, by staring at it and pointing at it with those numbers present, and the way that the numbers and the lyrics are, I feel like, you know, it’s good to let people know about it, but I almost feel like it was kind of a dick joke.”
