Before the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, Tool’s Maynard James Keenan spoke with Allison Hagendorf in an interview and shared his thoughts on rock vocalists he considers the ‘real’ rockers. He admitted he doesn’t see himself as one of them.
“No, not at all,” he said when asked if he sees himself as a vocalist. Instead, he views himself as an instrument in the band. “I feel like I’m an instrument within the mix and I’m just trying to find my place within the arrangement. That makes sense, that’s not colliding with the rest of the stuff. So if anything I’m very organized. I’m organizing a vocal within a context of songs not necessarily a vocalist.”
Keenan named two vocalists he thinks deserve the title: “Chris Cornell is a vocalist. Freddie Mercury is a vocalist.”
Throughout his career with Tool, Keenan has performed at the back of the stage, unlike many frontmen. He explained why in an earlier interview with Kerrang!. “With Tool, Danny’s drums are so loud, he has like 17 arms and 15 legs, and then you’ve got Adam’s row of amps and Justin’s wall of bass. It just makes it way harder for the front-of-house to have a mix if [I’m] down front. And the position up top is also great, visually, because I can see what’s going on, we can connect with each other by looking at each other. If I was facing the audience, my back would be to what’s happening, so I can’t take cues.”
Tool has announced its first set of tour dates for 2025, including four festivals. These shows will be the band’s first performances in South America, playing at three Lollapalooza festivals and Festival Estéreo Picnic.
These four shows will take place at multi-day festivals between March 21 and March 30. The band’s most recent performance was at the Tons of Rock Festival in Oslo, Norway, on June 27, where they played a 10-song set featuring two tracks from each of their five full-length albums.
