Tool and A Perfect Circle frontman Maynard James Keenan is the latest guest on Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich’s Beats 1 show It’s Electric! The first half of the two-part episode premieres this Sunday (April 21st) at 3 p.m. PST/6 p.m. EST on Beats 1 on Apple Music, with the second half airing a week later. In two exclusive clips from the wide-ranging interview, the Tool, A Perfect Circle and Puscifer frontman discusses his time in the army — which he joined in order to pay for art school — and the challenge of “staying relevant” for an Generation X artists without being “stenchy” about it.
“It gets easier to get lazy. So the only way to really do that is to always try to figure out some way to take yourself outside of your comfort zone. If you can get out of your comfort zone, you can then tap into things that are in a way fresh. I suppose you could kind of chalk it up to staying relevant, and at our age now, you see a lot of artists coming out of the woodwork trying to clearly desperately try to remain relevant.
That stinks, that’s just stenchy. Just be relevant with what you’re doing, and be okay with not being part of the future. If you can get your head around that, that you’re not going to a part of the next generations’s focus, for egomaniacs like us, that’s fucking hard.”
