As you might expect for someone who’s in three bands, is a sometime actor, has just written a graphic novel, has become a mushroom farmer, rears chickens and ducks and is starting a gin project, there’s no such thing as a regular day for Maynard James Keenan.
Somewhere amid this “fun chaos” (his words) has emerged the excellent Normal Isn’t, the new record from Puscifer, the Tool and A Perfect Circle ringleader Keenan’s shapeshifting, genrejumping, alt.rock-ish, electro-tinged side project that – given that it’s now the most prolific output vehicle for Keenan’s restless creativity – probably shouldn’t be called a side project any more. After all, he needs something to do when the grapes are picked and the ducks and chickens have laid all the eggs they can muster.
“There’s seasonal focuses,” he says from his home in Jerome, Arizona on a mild, sunny January morning. “There’s more writing going on when there’s less farming and production activity. But sometimes I don’t have it in me, I just have to have a cup of coffee and spend time with my dog.”
Article continues belowIt’s hard to imagine one of rock’s most inventive and “why not?” figures putting his feet up. Since making his mainstream breakthrough with Tool in the 90s, Keenan always seems to have had something on the spin, pivoting from that band’s epic, arena-sized prog-metal to the anthemic hard rock of A Perfect Circle to making Puscifer a home for everything else. For a long time, Puscifer always felt like a curious little side dish to those main courses, a place where moody country-tinged atmospherics, industrial-punk and seething art-rock co-exist in… well, not exactly peace, but with a devilish scowl on their face.
But no longer are Puscifer the wacky third wheel of Keenan’s musical pursuits. Instead, this band who called their 2007 debut V Is For Vagina have grown into a muscular and frequently thrilling rock band. Completed by multi-instrumentalist Mat Mitchell and British vocalist, guitarist and keyboard player Carina Round, they reach a peak on latest album Normal Isn’t, a record full of barbed riffs, stomping grooves and razorsharp hooks. Its lyrics read very much like an incensed state-of-the-nation address. At its best it sounds like Nine Inch Nails soundtracking an episode of Black Mirror.
"I don’t know if you noticed, but the fucking world’s on fire and I don’t think there’s enough buckets around to help put it out,” says Keenan. “There’s a lot of people that don’t seem interested or even notice that it’s on fire. We’ve lost the fucking way. I think the ability to talk to each other is vanquished. It’s been unplugged. Frustrating times.”
“This record says what great music has always said about the world,” adds Carina Round, speaking from home in LA. “It doesn’t matter what kind of fucking shitshow is happening, art and music can always bring a joy universally. Just make beautiful shit, no matter what’s happening, that’s what we stand for.”
Every time Keenan picks up his phone, he’s reminded of the resounding grimness of modern times, constantly reminded of our magnetic need to doomscroll. It’s a topic he explores with a frenzied snarl on the glam-rock grooves of Normal Isn’t closer The Algorithm.
“I lean left, but I’m definitely centrist because it’s more about education and it’s about understanding motivation, and I’m absolutely abhorrently opposed to fundamentalist extremism. And there’s a whole bunch of those these days – right, left, centre, extremist people that are just latching on to a thing and they can’t move,” he states. “They are stuck, they’re going to die on this hill over stupid shit. And that’s the nature of the programming, of the AI, of the algorithms, feeding that dopamine addiction. We’re just being fucking puppeteered.”
Like a contestant on a particularly apocalyptic episode of Catchphrase, Keenan thinks it’s his duty to say what he sees.
“I’m not a politician, I’m not a soldier – I was a soldier, but I’m not a soldier,” he says. “My only primary motivation is to see what I see, report the story. All I can do is what I know how to do, which is to tell stories, sing songs, make food, get you drunk. That’s all I can do.”
Keenan, Round says, is a very intense co-pilot when Puscifer are recording. “When he’s making a record or in that moment recording a vocal or writing a vocal part, he’s extremely focused,” she says. “He’s a very focused person and he’s very goal-orientated. He’s a lot more fun to hang out with after he’s got the thing done than he is before. He’s preoccupied by the thing he needs to do until he’s done it.”
But Normal Isn’t isn’t all gloom and doom (scrolling). After all, at the album’s centre is the pounding anthem Self-Evident, in which Keenan attempts to fit as many childish insults as he can into the lyrics. Possibly it’s the only song ever to include the term ‘bunghole’.
“That’s bucket-list stuff, right?” Keenan declares. “I want to see the Grand Canyon… maybe go to Bhutan one day… somehow make the words ‘bunghole’ and ‘twat’ make sense in a song. Bucket-list stuff.”
“He’s been a big fan of English insults for a long time,” says a laughing Round, who joined the band back in 2009. “It was actually one of our first bonding experiences. But he wasn’t immersed in it growing up, so he’s like: ‘Why did they mute the word ‘twat’? He didn’t realise that’s a pretty bad insult.”
Comedy and skits have been ingrained in Puscifer’s DNA since the beginning, with Keenan channelling his teenage love of Benny Hill and Monty Python, a warped sense of humour aided and abetted by later shows such as Kids In The Hall, Trailer Park Boys and League Of Gentlemen. The band’s origins are steeped in it.
“The early days of Puscifer, it was sketch comedy combined with the music in a comedy club in LA,” he recalls. “Laura Milligan was the host, and she would have themes for every week. You had this constant parade of sketch comic artists and writers and stand-ups doing their bits within the context of whatever she was setting up for the theme that weekend. That’s where Puscifer started, it was supposed to be the closing act. Other weeks it wouldn’t be us, it would be Tenacious D closing the show.”
Alongside the twisted humour of Keenan’s lyrics is the cast of misfit alter egos he’s come up with across the band’s career; an array of memorable buffoons including characters such as Major Douche, Special Agent Dirk Merkin, Billy D and, a recently revived Keenan favourite, Reverend Soquet.
“He’s an absolute glutton,” the singer tuts, “just pounding doughnuts and fried chicken. He claims to be a Christian on the righteous path, but he’s just a fucking pervert. We dusted him off for some filming, and I think I gained weight just filming because it was constantly eating chips, doughnuts and pizza.”
Despite carving out a career as a master showman in his element at the front – or, in Tool’s case, the back – of the stage, Keenan says that, really, he’s a homebody. “I like a little bit of calm,” he says. “I definitely need the nothing time.” Although it doesn’t sound like ‘nothing’ time. At home he’s trying to grow vegetables which, if his mushroom operation is anything to go by, will be soon feeding the town. “It started out at five pounds a week, and now we’re going up to sixty pounds of mushrooms a week. We can sell some of those off or use them for our restaurants.”
Then there’s the ducks and chickens to feed and the wine operation to oversee (Keenan founded his winery, Caduceus Cellars, in 2004). These are the places that his brain goes when the world gets a little too heavy, a place of calm that he hopes can come in handy for his community.
“I’m just hoping I can give people a safe space for a minute to get their head together,” he says, “relearn how to feed themselves, and somehow remember that there are monsters in the world but usually the monsters are the ones somehow feeding that monster within you, and if you can figure out that you have control over that.”
As a dad, he tries to make sure his family are grounding themselves in what actually matters. “It’s finding out where my daughter’s head is at, where my son’s head is at,” he says. “They’re on their own journey. All I can do is support them. They’re gonna have to make their own mistakes. I can only help them so much, because telling them what to think doesn’t help them.”
The world facing his children, he says, is incomparable to when he was a kid. Not long ago, he overheard his daughter discussing the rightwing, Trump-led Project 2025, and couldn’t help but think of how it contrasted with his own childhood. “I have a pretty good idea of what I was doing at the age of ten,” he says. “But she’s with her friends talking Project 2025. Can you imagine being ten years old talking about that shit?”
Keenan is a man of many talents, but there are still some things he regrets not having in his skillset. He wants to play in the Premier League, for example. Which probably won’t happen, given that he’s a 61-year-old with no previous football experience. Besides, he reckons he’d have more luck in the NBA.
Indeed, he only gravitates towards things where he feels there’s a remote chance of achievement. He’d love to be multi-lingual, for example, but feels like he’s missed the boat.
“I didn’t really dig in when I should have,” he says. “If I had a genie, one of the wishes would be to speak, understand, read, write all aspects of every language ever, and language in context too; read something on a piece of stone they unearth somewhere and go: ‘Oh, that’s a joke. They’re making fun of the breadmaker down the street.’”
As the frontman of bands with a very devoted set of diehard followers, perhaps with some bordering on over-committed, Keenan has read some crazy things about himself. “There’s always silly shit, like I removed a rib to blow myself,” he says. “If that was real, I would’ve removed a rib a long time ago. But no, I didn’t.” Another time, he came across a tale that he hated his fans. “I don’t hate anybody!” he declares. “I’m fucking terrified of them.”
But that more comes down to how Keenan looks at them, looking at him. He can’t deal with the platitudes. “We’re just trying to get this right, man! I’m not who they think I am, I’m a fraud… I’m just trying to get it right and then you come up praising me?! I don’t trust people to begin with, and now you think I’m more than I am… That freaks me out. Just listen to the music, because I’m not that special.”
At times like that, perhaps Keenan retreats to his sanctuary, feeds the ducks, feeds the chickens, weighs the mushrooms, calms his mind. Then, perhaps, he’ll think about the terrible state of the world and try to find something funny to grab on to, go back indoors and start writing again. Because, he says, “you have to have that balance of comedy and tragedy, otherwise we’ll just fucking go to war with ourselves”.
Maynard James Keenan tells stories, sings songs, gets you drunk. That’s all he knows how to do. We’ll drink to that.
Normal Isn’t is out now via Puscifer Entertainment/Alchemy Recordings/BMG.
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