Maynard james Keenan

songwriter,musician

Living life. Trying to learn how to cook better and bake better and read some books.Australian Shiraz.Making wine. I'm starting a vineyard...

Everything revolves around the music when it comes to Tool. Music is about listening, the more you play, the more the magic spreads. For me, life is writing and I can do it anywhere. It doesn't matter where I am. I listen. I write. I live. And if you don't live, you have nothing to write about.

Turn off your television. Go do something.

Aries

I always knew that I wanted to be an artist. I never even
thought about it. It was always there in the back of my
head. We had those forms in school, just stupid forms you
had to fill out where they asked you all sorts of things.
For example, what you want to be when you grow up. There
were a lot of choices to make and I always picked artist. I
never once picked doctor, lawyer, firemen or something like
that. It was always artist. I always knew that I wanted to
be creative, that I wanted to create something. Even if I
didn't know what when I was a child. smart and witty man,
equally at ease discussing history ( parents were both
teachers)
a veteran of both the U.S. Army (soldiered for a few years
in the early '80s, when I adopted the "Maynard" moniker on
a whim) and art school ( I'm into print-making), is hardly
the grim and alienated character that early Tool
compositions might suggest. Today, I'm a happily unmarried
father (my son, Devo, has a tiny cameo on the
current APC album, Thirteenth Step); a knowledgeable wine
enthusiast (my home cellar is stocked with more than 2,000
bottles); and a man who treasures my friends, many of whom,
naturally, are musicians or, like the late Alice in
Chains frontman Layne Staley, were. I have enemies, too, of
course chief among them, perhaps, Courtney Love, whose
daughter Frances Bean (her child by the late Kurt Cobain)
was the object of an attempted T-shirt intervention I did
some years back.

I just hope that our fans are people who are inspired by
music, and just use our music as a background or
inspiration for whatever it is they do. I would hope they
would be our fellow artists, rather than trying to emulate
or idolize clowns like us.
There is still a future with music, because people want
music. But I don't know if the record labels will be
involved. The panic you're seeing now is basically coming
from the labels trying to figure out how they're gonna
monopolize and manipulate and suck the blood out of artists
anymore.