Danny Carey Quotes.
Yeah, I grew up playing lots of jazz music in school.
It’s pretty weird to me that our music is as popular as it is.
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.
Making 13-minute tracks is pretty alternative, I think!
Our crowds seem to keep growing whether we put out a record or not, so I feel very lucky to have that support.
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 lead singer is such a prominent thing, where drums are more of a supporting instrument.
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.
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.
We rarely write in the studio. Everything’s already completely arranged before we go in. That way, we can really focus on getting the recording right.
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.
We got full artistic integrity and autonomy over what we were doing, and that was the main important thing that kept our band alive.
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.
The drums can get pretty boring as a solo instrument.
You can equate our music to childbirth. It’s brutal and harsh, but there’s still a beautiful thing occurring.
We’re not really in the business to sell ourselves. We want to sell what we work on.
Every record I’ve ever done with Tool has been on tape.
We toured for close to three years after ‘Undertow’ came out, so by the time we started to work on ‘AEnima,’ we had matured as functional musicians, and that changes your sound completely. Once you have that kind of freedom, an idea will come into your head and you can do it justice.
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.
Our fans are loyal as can be, that’s for sure.
Tony Williams, Billy Cobham and Lenny White; some of those guys were big influences on me.
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.
Chaos is the undercurrent of everything that happens in life.
Mike Patton and Dave Lombardo – those guys are a good, heavy influence.
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’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.
Those late ’60s early ’70s bands would take it really far out and get super-weird.
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.
No one can be their best every night.
