Tool, Puscifer and A Perfect Circle vocalist Maynard James Keenan reckons he’s either a “psychic” or a “psycho” when it comes to writing lyrics.
He’s gearing up to tour Puscifer’s latest album, Existential Reckoning, which he believes remains relevant even though it arrived in October 2020.
Keenan told AZ Central: “The way I write is not very specific to a thing or place or person. I tend to keep it all a little wider open.” That’s the reason, he added, why “the subject matter is still relevant. I mean, the pendulum is still swinging.”
He offered a light-hearted take on why his words still hammer home despite time having passed: “Well, you know, I am psychic. Or psycho. Which one is the one that predicts stuff?”
He added that he loved playing tracks live because they change in the process. “I'm just excited for the chance to develop these songs in a live setting,” he said. “Because the more you play them live, the more they evolve. And I think it's important to keep breathing life into these things, to never be static, just kind of repeating yourself. Or parroting yourself.”
Puscifer was originally a Keenan solo project with assistance from others, but he said the project had actually become more of what he’d wanted it to be when Carina Round joined in 2009. “It’s no holds barred. It's bigger. It's more,” he said. “And more in tune with the original idea than the original idea, honestly. Even an earlier song, we do it and go, ‘Wow, I really like that song. Hey, what if we completely broke it and started over and did four different versions?’ ‘Sure, why not?’”
