Maynard James Keenan
Maynard James Keenan
Maynard James Keenan, often referred to by his initials MJK, is an American musician, record producer, winemaker, and actor, best known as the vocalist for Grammy Award-winning progressive metal band Tool. He is originally from Ohio, but spent his high school and college years in Michigan. After serving in the United States Army in the early 1980s, he attended Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids. He moved to Los Angeles, California in 1988 to pursue a career...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth17 April 1964
CountryUnited States of America
Maynard James Keenan quotes about
I'm a pessimist. But I'm a pessimist with a sense of responsibility.
Prescott National Forest is right on the edge of my home in Arizona.
A lot of people into Tool, for some reason, are not interested in humor.
Desert, in generally, is a very good place to find yourself. Or lose yourself.
Adam does most of the work when it comes to videos and he basically does the same as I do with the lyrics. The videos are his visual interpretations of our music.
I feel like with music there's so much ego rooted in expressing your thoughts and your experiences with it.
The process that we go through in recording with Tool is very organic, but at the same time it is very thought out. There is a very left-brain process of dissecting what we're doing and drawing from source material; it's very research oriented and esoteric.
Seems like Ive been here before. Seems so familiar. Seems like Im slipping into a dream within a dream.
I see a lot of patterns in our behavior as a nation that parallel a lot of other historical processes.
Everything revolves around the music when it comes to Tool.
The army influences everything I do. Certainly it teaches you discipline, which is a necessary element of development. I think there's more of a collaborative understanding in the band because of that.
If the education of our kids comes from radio, television, newspapers - if that's where they get most of their knowledge from, and not from the schools, then the powers that be are definitely in charge, because they own all those outlets.
But I'm a hot-blooded Italian by nature. Whatever the situation you present, I'm going to make something out of it.
We're five people, five individuals who came together to create something, to make music and to complete each other musically, to form a perfect circle.