In case you hadn’t heard, Maynard James Keenan is currently on the campaign trail promoting his new biography, A Perfect Union of Contrary Things, hitting up book stores around the US and conducting interviews, which has been a boon for fans of the frontman looking for juicy tidbits about his fascinating mind and career.
For one thing, we’ve already heard that he almost fronted Rage Against the Machine, that two of each bands’ biggest songs were written during the same session, and that A Perfect Circle have big plans for the new year, including a tour and quite possibly even a new album, which fans have been waiting on for almost as long as the new Tool record.
But as Consequence of Sound reports, during a recent interview with Yahoo! Music, Maynard reflected on his long, storied career and chalked much of it up to being in the right place at the right time, saying he tries his best not to take credit for the success of Tool and his various other projects.
“When you start seeing some success, you start believing that your choices, actions, and attitudes are the absolute concrete reason for that success, and that’s where you start going down the rabbit hole,” Maynard said of the success Tool found with the release of their seminal 1996 album Aenima.
Maynard went further, using Nirvana and the explosion of grunge music out of Seattle as another example, saying that whilst the band’s involved in that movement were admittedly poised and talented, their success had more to do with being prepared to strike whilst the iron was hot than anything else.
“But it could be just circumstances. It just happened to be a perfect time for Nirvana to emerge ‘cause people were tired of hair bands,” he said. “I don’t know. It might have had nothing to do with Nirvana. It was just timing. I’m not taking anything away from any of the musicians that were on those waves that were about to crest.”
“All due respect to all of those musicians, but I feel that the problem then is that generally those musicians feel like they actually created the wave, when they were just on it and were prepared as it crested,” the singer, who will soon be in the country with Puscifer, added. “That starts to be the poison.”
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“I would love to take credit for that statement,” Maynard said when asked if he anticipated the wave of alternative rock that brought Tool success. “Hell, yeah. That’s me… No, that’s totally not me… I guess it could be perceived as calculated, but a lot of it really is following instincts and flying by the seat of your pants, and then when it works out you point backwards and go, ‘Yeah, I meant to do that.’”
“From my perspective, that’s what it feels like. With hindsight, when you’re looking at it, it looks like it was calculated. But I think a lot of those things that appear to be calculated, there’s no way, standing in the shoes you’re in and you’re about to take that step, you truly know what’s gonna happen. It really is more like, ‘Well, I’m just gonna jump.'”
