Before the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame ceremony took place, Tool’s Maynard James Keenan sat down with Allison Hagendorf for an interview and named a few rock vocalists he thinks are the ‘real’ rockers. However, he admitted that he wasn’t among these names.
“No, not at all,” the frontman responded when asked if he sees himself as a vocalist. Apparently, he rather sees himself as something else 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.”
He also named two vocalists he thinks deserve the title: “Chris Cornell is a vocalist. Freddy Mercury is a vocalist.”
Since the start of his career with Tool, Keenan has been performing at the back of the stage rather than on the front like most vocalists.
“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,” he explained to Kerrang! why he prefers performing in the back of the stage. “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 2025 tour dates, including four festivals. These will be the band’s first performances in South America. The band will perform at three Lollapalooza festivals and Festival Estéreo Picnic.
These four shows will happen 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. They played a 10-song set with two tracks from each of their five full-length albums.