During an appearance on Inside Track Podcast, TOOL drummer Danny Carey talked about the band’s latest album Fear Inoculum, and explained why it took 13 years to be released after the previous album 10,000 Days.
“We toured for five or six years after 10,000 Days, then we didn’t want to see each other for a little while so we took a couple of years of break, had kids, and then we started working. We were probably good, solid five years on it.”
When asked how long Fear Inoculum was it supposed to take to be done, Carey replied: “I kinda wish I could say it did take 13 years to make. There’s nothing wrong with that. We actually rushed it a bit. 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.
“We don’t have anybody in our band that’s like a composer so it’s, like, we’re all in there doing it together day by day, and I don’t suggest this to any other band [laughs], but that’s the way we do it, and that’s the way we’ve always done it,” he continued.
“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 way that we also work with Maynard [James Keenan, vocals], we don’t give it to Maynard until we do that, like, this is me, Adam [Jones, guitar], and Justin [Chancellor, bass] we’re talking about now, and then we send that to Maynard because Maynard, he has to commit to this concept. And it’s like nothing bums him out more than, like, when we send him this thing and then we change it. Once we give it to him, he commits and that’s it, he doesn’t want to change it.
He added: “We went through the whole bit trying to do that on the previous records, like, sending something and then all of a sudden we go, ‘Oh, wait, let’s change this chorus.’ Maynard will be, like, ‘So, you’re pretty much saying I just did all this work for nothing.’ I understand his point of view.”
You can get tickets for TOOL‘s ongoing North American tour here.
