As you grow older, you want to learn, you want to change, you want to evolve and you don't want to live in fear. Fear is the mind killer.
Justin Chancellor
There's a vulnerability to our music that attracts people.
I'm a big Beethoven fan, and you'll struggle to find a three-minute song on any of his stuff.
It's not like people are going to be reading about us every day in the magazines.
I was living in London with my brother, and he was a friend of Matt Marshall, who signed Tool. So we were the first people over in Europe to get the first Tool demo in 1991, and me and my brother immediately cottoned on to it.
I'm still like a little kid about it, where I'm just so happy and excited that people want to come to our shows and watch us play. I still go outside the venues and take a picture of our name on the marquees. I still feel like I'm trying hard to be in a good band, I really do. And I think that's a healthy approach.
You can't help but have ideas when you're inspired musically.
I think that's an idea that's always appealed to us - to let something go where it wants to.
We're our own worst critics.
We lock ourselves away and we concentrate on what we're doing and try not to think about the madness that's surrounding it, and all the hype.
The last thing I do is go and listen to heavy rock music. But I love electronic music. The purity of the tones is inspiring, because it's obviously much more controlled than a guitar tone.
Playing '10,000 Days' in concert was very challenging but infinitely rewarding. It's much more sensitive and emotional than our other songs, and it requires pacing yourself and also being very vulnerable.
My mother was sort of mildly religious, but the rest of us, you know, we didn't really have it forced on us.
Writing is a grueling process for us, and once we finish an album, we go on tour for a couple of years. Plus, we're always very involved in our own business, so we need a break when we come back.
Everyone knows we take our time. We're really trying to be responsible with ourselves in trying to discover ideas that haven't been discovered before. It's kind of an alchemy, how we experiment.
Writing music is hard if your head is full of waste.
Maybe you have a particular type of sound you want to go for, but if you really want to be original, there's no real recipe for that. For me it's just about letting it come to you... if you can let your head clear out, then almost anything is available.
In the end, our way of writing music is a long process of experimentation. We enjoy the luxury of taking this very seriously and giving it the time that it needs.
You have to be completely brave and sincere about what you're doing to just not ever compromise and change it to what you think someone else might want.
If you start to believe the hype about yourself, then you start to lose the bigger picture, and your focus is in the wrong place.
We don't ever write stuff individually and say, 'OK, this is gonna be the song.' We bring in ideas in their rawest form and bounce them around to find the thing that is bigger than any individual's idea.
I used to aspire to being more of a traditional bass player, to be honest. People say I play it like a guitar - and I was a guitar player when I was growing up. I started learning when I was eight, and that's what I was fascinated with in my teen years.
The whole idea is preserving the music and the art and not having us and our faces and our individual characters distract from that. That was the original idea, and now it's really become part of what Tool is. It has allowed us to really concentrate on our music and our show.
The whole thing about Tool is that it kind of feeds on itself. If it's going, it's going. If it's at a grinding halt, there's either the will to pick it up again and get it going or not. We've been through serious stages of nothing... business problems or personal problems or whatever.
Anything you spend a long time on, of course it would be nice if everyone likes it. But I think the strength that we've got is that we always concentrate on what we want it to be like and not really trying to please other people.
When you're getting older, you think about what you have to offer, and what's the point of your life.
We are all musicians, and we're not really good musicians. But we have this gracious gift that has been bestowed on us, and we don't want to disappoint. So I guess our biggest fear would be, just giving up.
If you're going to play bass, then play bass how you play bass. You can learn technique and theory, but we want to hear what you have to offer.
It's okay to be inspired by other people and it can be a useful learning tool to play other people's music, but let out what's inside of you.
Find your voice and don't be afraid to explore it.
I'm ashamed to say it, but I watch YouTube videos of our live shows, wondering if it actually sounded the way it sounded when I was playing it, and the consistent thing I see is that you can feel the anxiety and the tension and it's over-aggressive a lot of the time.
It's very rare that we play a gig and we all come off and say 'That was great, I had a great time!' There's always someone that's had a bad time. So the goal is always to achieve the next level of performing the piece that you've written. You're looking for something that you haven't even captured on the album.
Every time we record, and every time we go out live, we try and beat what we've already done.
We're not complete prodigies musically and as a band together it takes more and more work to find something new and special.
I don't know what I did to my main bass. I've poured makeup into it, I've bashed it around - and we've gone in the back and cleaned it up... It sounds amazing and one of a kind at this point, but it picks up a really decent radio signal if you're anywhere near an antenna.
