Maynard James Keenan Rejects Theory He Predicted The Pandemic In His Lyrics
By Andrew Magnotta @AndrewMagnotta
May 21, 2020
Tool and A Perfect Circle frontman Maynard James Keenan is hand-waving a popular fan theory that he sometimes predicts the future in his lyrics.
Keenan has returned to similar themes on his recent work. It may just so happen that right now the rest of the world is focusing on those things too.
The title alone of Tool's latest album, Fear Inoculum (2019), could be construed as prophetic as a concerned world desperately awaits a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. Additionally, APC's 2018 album Eat the Elephant broadly dealt with subjects like economic inequality and the impersonal nature of communication in the modern world.
While those might seem like predictions in retrospect, Keenan told Zane Lowe that's only because history repeats itself.
"I feel like we're going to go through a lot of changes," Keenan said. "We're going to go through a lot of growing pains — and not all of us are going to make it through those growing pains. That's the hardest part, as a human being, to really grasp: that you might not be a part of what happens over the crest in that new valley. You just might not be there because you didn't pay attention to the basics. You didn't listen to the wind, you didn't smell the air ... simple things."
He continued: "But it's not really prophetic, it's just understanding patterns and understanding human nature and where we're going. Although they might seem specific, they're not. They're human experience."
Keenan previously suggested that he was looking inward when it came to many of the lyrics on Fear Inoculum. Given the 13-year gap between Tool albums, the singer said the band was experiencing a "crippling fear" that its comeback record would fail and all its work had been for nothing.
Tool, like every other band, has postponed its tour until future notice.
Photo: Getty Images