During a day of interviews to plug Puscifer, vocalist and lyricist Maynard James Keenan and singer Carina Round met with an excited German journalist. He’d prepared questions about Normal Isn’t, the band’s new album, but went off topic and gushed about how much he loved Tool. Not one to cater to flattery, Maynard’s responses became increasingly terse. Oblivious to his faux pas, the writer continued to jabber.
“Maynard was getting really irritated by all the fawning,” recalls Carina, sitting in her studio in LA, wearing a brown cardigan over a Whitesnake t-shirt. “It got to the point where I felt like Maynard was going to break, so I said, [quoting a line from Monty Python’s Life Of Brian], ‘He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy,’ and we both started laughing, which broke the tension and pretty much ended the interview.”
Having worked with Puscifer since 2009, appearing on four full-length albums as well as numerous EPs and concert releases, Carina has developed a keen awareness of her bandmates’ pet peeves, a sensitivity to their quirks, and the ability to vibe with their senses of humour.
Article continues below“Comedy is the glue that connects us,” she says. “A lot of times we’ll be working, and if we run into an obstacle, we’ll say demented shit and be in stitches. We take on humour and embody it and embrace it as friends and musicians.”
“One thing Maynard says a lot is ‘laughter first’,” adds primary songwriter Mat Mitchell, sitting before a huge studio control board, his large black glasses framing his shaved head. “These days, it’s easy to get sad, angry or frustrated about what’s going on in the world. Laughing at things is a therapeutic way to deal.”
A multi-instrumentalist who also produces, supervises film and video content, designs the band’s sets and tackles logistics, Mat is the band’s full-time jack-of-all-trades, and the filter through which all musical ideas are processed. According to Maynard, he’s Puscifer’s secret weapon.
“Mat has the final say,” Maynard explains. “Once he hears what I did with the idea that he had, I am the inspiration, I am the muse. Of course, I’m the storyteller – I’m writing words. So what I bring to the table is, I created a human being out of a synth, right?”
With bawdy catalogue titles like “V” Is For Vagina, “C” Is For (Please Insert Sophomoric Genitalia Reference Here), and Money Shot, and ridiculous song names such as Cuntry Boner and Mantastic, it’s hardly surprising that Puscifer’s new album is full of gibberish and double entendres. Check out: ‘A walking, talking skid mark prat / A muppet and a twit and twat / That’s you (Self Evident); ‘It’s never on you / Single minded Muggle smuggler’ (A Public Stoning); and, ‘I’m one tough man-tasticle’ (Mantastic).
Onstage, Puscifer expand on the humour with comedic sketches, elaborate sets (which have included a wrestling ring, spaceship cabin and trailer park), and surreal plotlines presented by a host of rotating characters. There’s whack-job Special Agent Dick Merkin, redneck scofflaw Billy D, his trashy wife Hildy Berger, and the military commander Major Douche. Puscifer will introduce new characters Bellendia Black, Fanny Grey and The Synth Whisperer on tour.
“For the new show, I’m going back in time, like the end of Deadpool, where he starts shooting himself and cleaning up the timeline,” Maynard says. “If you didn’t come to our shows over the last 10 or 15 years, you have no idea what some of the characters and references are. So, we’re going to connect the dots and massage the timeline so it makes more sense. But it never really makes any sense, so don’t expect it to.”
When asked about Bellendia and Fanny, Maynard shares only that their backstories will be revealed in graphic novels later this year. He’s tight-lipped about many subjects. He won’t talk at all about his personal life, and while he loosely discusses the band’s songs, he won’t answer questions about any specific lyrics.
When they talk over Zoom, Carina and Mat keep their cameras on. Speaking from a hotel in Sydney, Australia after a Tool show, Maynard blocks his video. All that’s visible are the words ‘Caduceus Cellars’, the singer’s Arizona wine vineyard. The mystique acts as a barrier.
“There’s a level of protection he puts up until he feels he can trust someone,” Carina says. “He’s not a people pleaser. He’s not going to be overly sweet to you because he wants you to like him. Once you understand that, and he gets to know you, he becomes much more approachable. The first time that happened for me was when we bonded over English comedy.”
Maynard’s comedy favourites include Monty Python, The Young Ones, Fawlty Towers and Ricky Gervais. While strongly rooted in humour, Maynard is dead serious about the sorry state of the world. Normal Isn’t is Puscifer’s most trenchant and biting release to date, targeting authoritarianism, corruption, wealth disparity, partisanship and the media.
“We’re going through a period that is like nothing we’ve experienced in our lifetime,” Maynard says in the dry, even-keeled tone of a professor teaching physics. “Has it happened before? I believe so. But for us right now, this is not normal at all. So, the biggest thing we want to convey is to think for yourself, and questioning authority is a big part of that.”
What’s Maynard’s position on the US removing Venezuela president Nicolás Maduro, the Epstein files, or the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants under the Trump administration? We can only guess.
“Questioning authority is important, no matter who it is,” he says. “I don’t want to fall into the trap of saying, ‘This is how I think, so this is how you should think.’ If you’re trying to have followers and make them think like you do, you’re just building a cult. The idea is to help inspire people to problem-solve, be flexible, and be able to pivot, so when a new piece of legitimate information comes to light, they can observe, interpret, report, and react. It’s not my business to tell anyone who to vote for. The voting booth is anonymous. That’s the whole point.”
Part of Maynard’s skill as a lyricist involves delivering poignant messages through veiled metaphors that can be perceived differently depending on who is hearing them and what they’re going through in their lives.
“He takes these big experiences and synthesises them to create very specific feelings, but he leaves everything open to interpretation, which I think people on the left or the right could see in their own way,” Carina says. “And Maynard will never say, ‘You’re right’ or ‘You’re wrong.’”
What’s not so open to interpretation is the bleak, brooding and sometimes aggressive sounds of Normal Isn’t. Drawing from the deep basslines of Joy Division, the haunting keyboards of Nine Inch Nails and the angular guitars of The Cure and The Sisters Of Mercy, songs like Thrust, Bad Wolf and The Algorithm (Sessanta Live Mix) inject a previously downplayed level of foreboding into Puscifer’s cinematic soundscapes.
“The music is darker because it’s a reflection of a new global experience,” says Mat. “Here we are, floating in space, and there are things happening around us that we never thought would happen. But once they do happen, all of a sudden, we have to figure out what to do and how to cope. Everyone’s scratching their heads trying to figure it out. And then, all of a sudden, that crazy situation becomes the new normal, and we’re all holding our breath going, ‘OK, what’s next?'”
For Maynard, combining the sobering and sophomoric is Puscifer’s modus operandi.
“Everything has to be in balance,” he insists. “I still see the humour of fart jokes, but within the comedy, you have to write from your own perspective and feelings. I believe if I write from a conversational and cathartic point of view, it will work because it’s all about survival and maintaining, but it’s also about laughing. That’s the classic, even pre-Shakespearean balance of comedy and tragedy. You have to put them together, otherwise you lose your mind.”
On Thrust, Maynard sings, ‘Trying not to murder’s a daily fucking battle.’ The line repeats in an otherworldly warble as the recording slows. Then, the next passage kicks in, and tribal beats, staccato guitars and rapid breathing continue the journey. It’s harrowing, weird and fantastic – a sign of the times and, perhaps, the only sensible response to an insane world. So, does making jarring, elliptical music provide therapy for Maynard? Well, maybe, but so do viral videos.
“I find myself looking at a lot more African Gray and Caique parrot videos,” he explains – perhaps unsurprising given he’s always loved birds. “I also saw a video on YouTube where this dude redesigned a bike so the post would come up through the seat when it’s ridden. When a kid comes and steals the bike, the post goes right up his ass.”
Normal Isn’t draws from the foreign and familiar to create tangles of trip hop, synth pop, post-punk and alternative. Coupled with Maynard’s rhythmically varied vocals, which Mat describes as “things that throw you and make you dance with a limp”, Puscifer remain dynamic, contradictory, even subversive.
“We all have an aversion to the obvious,” Mat explains. “We don’t have any rules because, really, anything goes. It just has to be good. A lot of the time that means it can’t sound like anything else. So, when things feel too straight, we tend to want to break them and fuck them up.”
An established artist and engineer in the Austin music scene in the late 90s, Mat met Maynard in 2003 when A Perfect Circle needed a technical assistant for the Thirteenth Step tour. Mat took the gig, and it was there that he first saw how wilfully perverse Maynard could be.
“It was around the holidays, and he decided that he was going to be Santa,” Mat recalls. “From the minute he walked out of his dressing room, he was 100% in character and he wouldn’t break. It was strange. He’d stare at you and make you uncomfortable; he stayed that way for the whole show. I’ve seen him do that many times in other situations. When he gets into any of these characters, they’re impenetrable.”
When A Perfect Circle returned home, Maynard asked Mat to join him in the studio to help come up with creative approaches for the band’s anti-war covers album, Emotive. Then, he asked Mat to help write and produce Puscifer’s first full-length, “V” Is For Vagina.
“We’d developed a strong rapport from an engineer-artist perspective,” Mat says. “He and Danny Lohner (ex-Nine Inch Nails and A Perfect Circle) had done a couple of singles for Puscifer, but Maynard wanted to make it bigger. He asked me to come on tour with Tool and we put together Puscifer in dressing rooms and in hotels whenever we had a day off.”
Early collaborators included drummer Tim Alexander (ex-Primus), bassist Matt McJunkins (A Perfect Circle), and guitarist Jonny Polonsky. Then, in 2008, Mat saw Carina’s solo act and was so impressed he asked her to meet Maynard.
“When I showed up, there was a track that needed vocals,” Carina explains. “Maynard was in and out of the studio, but at one point, he came over and told me in a vague way what he was looking for, so I just did what I thought would sound good. When he came back later, he looked at me and said, ‘That’s not what I wanted.’” Carina’s heart sank, then Maynard added, “…but it’s really good.”
Puscifer used Carina’s take for The Humbling River, on 2009’s “C” Is For (Please Insert Sophomoric Genitalia Reference Here), and brought her on tour to both open and then perform with Puscifer. Carina describes the members of Puscifer as “demented in a symbiotic way”, because they’re all trying to make the band “better and different”.
“I’m a bit mouthy and say stupid shit all the time,” she says. “I say things other people are thinking, but won’t say, and get in trouble for it. So, I can be considered a slightly obnoxious presence in the room, and I think Maynard appreciates that. I’m an Aries. He’s an Aries. We connect. We like to work together. We all had mutual respect for one another from the beginning, and that has opened up into a friendship.”
Not just an angelic vocalist with a sassy mouth, Carina is a skilled composer. Having worked on her own music for years, she knows how to find key moments in a song, and what to add to them or delete from them to maximise their impact.
“Carina has the ability to take a step back, look at the music and go, ‘OK, here’s the spots that need spackle,’ Maynard says. “She can see and hear things the rest of us didn’t notice, and she’s definitely the glue that helps bind things together.”
Maynard, too, brought a previously unexplored dimension to Normal Isn’t. In addition to creating rhythmically complex vocal melodies, he worked on the song arrangements – almost by default. It started when he asked Mat to make him a small digital workstation so he could track vocal ideas on the road. After tinkering with the software, Maynard started writing his own riffs, hooks and beats for Puscifer.
“Well, I’ve been writing music since high school,” Maynard clarifies. “But for my bands, I passed the torch to other people that did it better in terms of actual instrumentation. I hadn’t cracked the code and reached a new level with something like Logic because I didn’t see the need to dive into it. Then Covid came and… what else are you going to do? So, I started writing riffs and programming to see if Mat was going to respond to it. There’s a bunch he did and a bunch he didn’t.”
Asked if his experience writing for Puscifer will lead to more creative ventures with A Perfect Circle (for which co-founder Billy Howerdel is currently working on new music) and Tool, Maynard replies – perhaps predictably – “You know, I guess everyone’s going to have to wait and see.”
For now, all eyes are on Puscifer. When the band surfaced in 2007, the only people who had heard of them were Tool devotees, and many were disappointed by the band’s lack of volume and aggression. Now four of Puscifer’s songs on Spotify have between 22 million and 35 million streams. A month before the release of Normal Isn’t, the single Self Evident was streamed almost a million times, while its video ratcheted up more than 725,000 YouTube views.
In addition, the band have been featured in many scores and soundtracks, and four Puscifer songs were used in the TV show Yellowstone. During the last two decades, they’ve found a fanbase as misfit as they are – and that suits Maynard just fine.
“We don’t write Beyoncé songs, so you have to find your audience when it comes to really leaning into cool goth stuff or progressive rock or jazz, and all those things colliding,” he explains. “We just naturally do what we do… and it’s not going to feed the people that tend to dine at Walmart.”
Normal Isn't is out now via Puscifer Entertainment/Alchemy Recordings/BMG
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