Tool’s Singer Says, ‘What Is Puscifer? Is What Puscifer Is’

Every hard rock and metal fan knows it takes Tool years to craft albums, and while the band’s main songwriters work on new tunes, frontman Maynard James Keenan busies himself with a variety of other endeavors – from his wine vineyards in Arizona to his multimedia project Puscifer, which recently released its third full-length studio album Money Shot.

Currently, Puscifer is on the road, presenting an unpredictable mixture of multi-hued experimental alt-rock songs, comedy sketches, and animation to fans across North America; and Keenan is doing a select number of interviews to promote the ensemble. But the vocalist only wants to plug Puscifer. He isn’t interested in answering questions about Tool. That’s something that’s been made perfectly clear to journalists, who have been specifically emailed not to ask about the band. Keenan abruptly hung up on the last writer who didn’t heed the warning.

For Tool fans hungering for the latest information about the band, the honest truth is that there’s not much to say. The band is writing music, but has not yet presented full songs to Keenan to provide lyrics. As he told Rolling Stone, “I write lyrics and melodies to music. If I don’t have music, I can’t.”

However, there’s plenty going on with Keenan and Puscifer. Money Shot is a mix of asymmetrical rhythms and beats colored with unconventional yet compelling melodies and a mix of airy male and female vocal harmonies. It’s at one uplifting and melancholy, both musically and lyrically; and Keenan seeks inspiration from a variety of subjects, including earthly wonders, celestial mysteries, and mankind’s proclivity for destroying everything around him.

Yahoo Music talked with Keenan about the ambitious objectives of Puscifer, the spirituality that drives his lyrics, the public’s hunger for negativity, his upcoming memoir and his disinterest in performing traditional arena rock shows.

You started presenting Puscifer music to the public in 2007, and at the time you said you didn’t expect people to grasp what you were doing with the project for several years.

It’s really hard for people to wrap their head around the fact that Puscifer isn’t a band. It’s a multimedia project. It’s not just six guys onstage crotch-rocketing and posturing. So I think the biggest shift has been people understanding that what is Puscifer? is what Puscifer is. It’s about embracing the chaos and getting rid of expectations of what you think you’re going to experience and just letting the experience happen. I feel like that took the obvious seven years for people to grasp.

Are people who only listen to the records missing the true experience?
Well, they’re only getting a piece of it, which is fine if that’s the piece that they want to embrace. But there is more.

Money Shot feels like a denser, more gravity-filled effort than the first two records.

I feel like the first record, V is For Vagina, was us trying to find our way but also avoid our old paths just so we didn’t sound like the old stuff. We wanted to make sure it was more of a score or a soundtrack for the things people hadn’t seen yet. But now that people understand that there are characters attached to this project and storylines and animation and video and humor, now we can settle back in to more of what I’m used to doing while still maintaining more of that soundtrack score approach to the music.

Did you want this to be a darker or more message-filled record than the others?

I don’t see that any of the other ones aren’t. I think that’s the misconception. A lot of times friends of friends will sort of poo-poo the earlier records and say they’re listening to the new one and liking it. I’ll say, “Oh yeah, here’s some brand new stuff,” and I’ll play them the old one. And they’ll go, “F–k yeah! See, if you do more stuff like this…” “Well, that is the old stuff dips–t.” If you go back and listen, a lot of the dark themes are there, it’s just you’re influenced by your perception and your perspective.

There’s a duality to your art. Multiple interpretations can be applied to even the titles of your records. A money shot is the most expensive scene in a movie, and of course there’s a more crass definition…

Or it can be the worm from the tequila bottle. You gotta go to the bottom of the Mezcal bottle to get that worm. I don’t see that I’m too concerned about how people interpret what I do. I don’t mean that to sound flippant. I just have a bunch of ideas and I’m going to express them the best way I can.

What prompted you to start working on a new Puscifer record? Does something trigger your brain like a withdrawal symptom?

It’s partially that. You have creative cycles that you get through and if you have enough pieces to put together, then it’s time to get to work. We had some of this stuff three to five years ago, then about 18 months ago we hit that spot where we had a bunch of ideas that we had been kicking around for a long time. And we said, “Okay, well if we turn up the heat a little bit and come up with these other ideas, we have an album.”

Do you like to work in fits and starts or long stretches?

The former, because writer and producer Mat Mitchell’s working on stuff when I’m not. I can be working on [the grape] harvest [for my wine vineyards] when he’s back in the studio putting songs together and shooting me Dropbox folders of stuff. I can look at it and give notes and then go back to what I was doing. And then we’ll get together out in Arizona or L.A. and spend a week hashing a bunch of it out, and then letting it marinate. That’s the trick, to set it aside and come back to it.

You had a daughter about a year ago. Was that a life-changing event for you or something that made you reflect on your childhood?

Well, I have a 20-year-old son so that already happened a long time ago. I don’t think it changed much of anything. There’s a new person around you, and you adjust to the situation. That major life change already occurred.

You seem to have a pessimistic view on society.

There are a couple songs that could be viewed that way…

“The Arsonist” and “Remedy” are pretty bleak?

Those are a couple songs. “Grand Canyon” has nothing to do with that and neither do many of the other songs. I guess if you want to look at the glass half empty, there’s some of that. But pointing out your concerns doesn’t mean you’re negative. Pointing it out is a step towards the positive. If someone says, “Hey, you’re f–king up,” it’s because he wants you not to be f–king up.

Do people put too much weight on the dark side of your art?

Most people focus on the negative. When you’re looking through the Internet you’re always going to click on the headline that seems the most negative and frictional. You don’t really click on the one that reads, “Come Hug Puppies,” you click on “Man’s Head Explodes in Walmart.”

“Grand Canyon” presents a juxtaposition of majestic beauty and insignificance…

No, it’s meant to open you up to reducing your focus on the petty. Just knowing how small we are in the universe opens up possibilities for you. Don’t worry about how people are using the word “oriental” instead of “Asian.” That’s so f—ing petty and boring. There’s much more beauty in the word. You don’t have to worry about what syllables people are using.

There’s much more beauty and much bigger problems.

I guess – until there aren’t.

What do you mean by that?

I think you have to maintain a healthy balance in the way you view things. Anyone who understands the Shakespearean train understands that comedy and tragedy have to be in balance, so it’s all there. Balance always follows imbalance. [The world] swings like a pendulum so everything’s going to work itself out. It’s just in this moment as an artist interpreting what we’ve observed and reporting it, we see the balance swing in one direction. But it’s a pendulum. It swings back.

That sounds like a Zen-like spiritual perspective.

It’s the basic foundation of most religions. It has nothing to do with spiritual endeavors. The spiritual part is what locks it in for people to do it. You talk about ghosts and they follow it like they’re either inspired or scared. But what’s really important in most religions is the repetition, the practice of understanding a thing that will save your ass when s–t goes sideways. Boiling water for a tea ceremony is about purifying the water, not about sitting down and making sure your hand goes in a certain direction when you’re pouring the tea. At a time when Japan gets completely wiped out by a Tsunami all the groundwater is contaminated. So if you look at every religion through those eyes, you start to see patterns in those practices, those repetitions that will naturally come up when things go sideways. They will just naturally do something that will save them.

Are you ever concerned that the pendulum will swing too far in one direction? Politically, economically, and environmentally the world is perhaps in the greatest state of turmoil it has ever been in. Do you think that mankind is heading towards extinction?

Maybe, and then it all works out because the earth is going to survive [laughs]. It will. It’s a conscious thing. It won’t go so far that it won’t balance things out… Oh, there’s the disconnect. You seem to think we’re included in the solution. I don’t necessarily believe that, so it’s all going to work out one way or the other, whether we’re there or not. Conscious people and the percentage of people that are paying attention and in their skin and are around for that stuff, yeah maybe part of you will survive. But there will be things that will happen that you didn’t plan on.

What was the greatest obstacle working on Money Shot?

Letting go. I wrote a lot of harmonies and I tend to respond to what I hear. The hardest part was on a couple of the songs having a bunch of harmonies written and then hitting a wall where I was going to write another harmony for a part and letting go and letting [vocalist] Carina [Round] do it instead. That way you end up with a different perspective or a different direction. Letting go of that was very difficult. She’s a fantastic vocalist and has great ideas, so it ended up being a positive move.

Live, Puscifer is unpredictable and multifaceted – comedic one moment, dead serious the next. Do you labor intensively over the shows or is it more like improvisational theater?

There’s definitely an element of, “Oh, s–t, how’s this going to go?” But Puscifer started in comedy clubs as part of sketch comedy. So that’s been the core for it. We’ve used characters, animation, tongue-in-cheek jokes in the artwork and music. And when we go out and do a show, we want to make sure that’s translated. We’re not just six people spitting our songs back at you from the stage. That’s kind of boring to me.

You recently announced you’re working on your memoir. What should readers expect?

It’s going to be a journey and will reveal a particular light on a particular path that I’ve taken. There’s a million ways to tell the story and there’s a million paths you can focus on so I’m writing it with my friend Sarah [Jensen]. It’s kind of a semi-autobiography spoken from a perspective of someone observing a person – not necessarily me – so you’re on the journey with the character. And it should be out in the fall.