Chaos is the undercurrent of everything that happens in life.
The sincerity of delivery is what always strikes me when I hear a good band. It's artist-expression driven, as opposed to being record-producer driven. There's a huge difference. One's motivation is impure, while the other is the highest form of expression, so that's what you aim for.
Mike Patton and Dave Lombardo - those guys are a good, heavy influence.
Pink Floyd and Yes and some of the old art-rock bands, you didn't know what they looked like. You were always looking for pictures, and that added to the mystique. It's much more interesting when you're forced to imagine or guess at these things because usually it's better than reality.
Tony Williams, Billy Cobham and Lenny White; some of those guys were big influences on me.
We're not in the business of putting up barriers; that's the job of politicians. They're the idiots who want to build walls between people.
Stylistically, we're trying to push things in different ways, but it always comes out sounding like Tool no matter what we're trying to do.
I think there is a collective unconsciousness, or some sort of consciousness, that you can tap into if you're open and brave enough to let everything go and be part of that.
We try to write things that can be interpreted on lots of different levels. There's not a right way or a wrong way... people can adventure a little.
It kind of renews my faith in humankind that there's long attention spans left out there that can listen to a 12-minute song.
We have pretty much all the facets of our business under our control now. Relying on someone else to do the right thing, you're just setting yourself up to get screwed. We control our own destiny and it's a really good feeling.
We're dealing with the chaos of life, and we're rubbing it down. The deeper you rub, the more patterns you can see until you realize that it's really an organized chaos. There isn't really ever any chance to understand it all, but we're here to keep rubbing.
No one can be their best every night.
It drove me mad not being able to know more about Pink Floyd when I was a little kid. But that's the great thing - there was this mystery behind it, and we couldn't find out enough. It made your mind work, it made you seek after it or try to interpret it. It made you envision or imagine what they were doing.
Anybody who digs your art, you what to share it with.
There are no leftover Tool songs because of the process it takes to compose our songs - the way we hash it out in a room with all three or four of us, that there's tons of riffs and jams and things. But there's no put-together songs that are sitting in the eaves.
The thing is, the way we write is all jams and bits and pieces that get pieced together and sometimes things are written with intentions of being a song, and then all of a sudden the main riff of this song, six months later turns into a verse or a chorus of another song.
It takes us long for a reason, but the end result is: we all completely believe in, not just every verse, every chorus, every bar is scrutinized, and that's the result of what you'll hear on this record.
The lead singer is such a prominent thing, where drums are more of a supporting instrument.
Yeah, I grew up playing lots of jazz music in school.
