In a new Facebook live video, Maynard James Keenan discussed former Pearl Jam drummer Matt Chamberlain’s bizarre and awesome contributions to A Perfect Circle’s new album Eat the Elephant.
Maynard said, “Matt Chamberlain, fantastic. That guy is unbelievable, some of the drums are by Matt. Isaac Carpenter was amazing too, Jeff Friedl, they all have a lot of different flavor.”
Billy Howerdel added, “Matt Chamberlain bringing Maynard’s chopsticks to the fold. I think it was ‘TalkTalk.'”
Maynard said, “He played drums with chopsticks.”
Howerdel added, “On ‘TalkTalk,’ that really fast part we couldn’t get quite right.”
Keenan told Uproxx about creating lyrics for Eat the Elephant, “You start with introspection and look outward a little bit to see how this piece fits in the whole. That’s always kind of been a starting point. Accountability is definitely a word I would use. Entitlement would be another. Just basic broad sweeps that come with where you’re at, where you’ve been, what do you see.
There are stages of your life, I’m sure if you’ve had kids, you read any of those children’s books, and they all disagree on whether or not the kids should have sushi, but there are some definite things that a lot of those books end up speaking of in terms of the progression of that child from birth to crawling to barely standing to walking to speaking. There’s a process and you could probably attach specific words to those processes. And it’s the same with this society and a culture and somebody speaking to that culture from their particular point of view. I think as a writer, you kind of have to keep that in mind. What color glasses are you looking through to make your commentary? If you can be self-aware enough for that, then at least there will be some grounding.”
