Justin Chancellor recently outlined how Tool writes new music. He went on to note how one of the major challenges is not to over-expand on ideas that each band member brings on board.
Tool might not have as many records as one would expect from a band that’s been around for 33 years. However, every album they’ve put out so far proved to be well worth the wait.
“After those early years when we were a new band, it’s a little easier, stuff comes a little more naturally, when you’re writing music. And obviously, it’s gotten famously labored, our creative process”, Justin Chancellor tells Dean Delray in a recent interview.
He went more in-depth about the creative dynamic within the band and Justin confirmed that jamming plays an important role in it. He said (transcribed by Ultimate Guitar):
“Adam [Jones, guitarist] has bunch of ideas, we keep it very simple. We try not to over-develop our own ideas, when we bring them in for Tool, so that we can present them as a building block, and then bounce it off each other. And then, we just learn each other’s stuff, and start playing around with it.
“Some days, at the beginning of the process, we’ll play for hours on one riff, and it’s really enjoyable, and then it can get to a point where it’s really [not] enjoyable [laughs], like a week.”
The bassist underlines that everything gets recorded during this process, adding:
“We do record everything while we’re doing this. Being that we all live in LA, there’s a lot of traffic driving home, so we would make CDs every day, sit in the car and carry on working basically. I’d listen to it all the way home. That way you’re absorbing everything, listening to what you did from a different perspective from when you’re actually performing it.
“And then [we] come in the next day with some ideas that stood out. But yeah, you can find stuff from bouncing around like that, but often there’s a lot of worth in the pure, original idea.”
Justin Chancellor’s project MTVOID with vocalist Peter Mohamed has come out of its nine-year hiatus, with a new album titled “Matter’s Knot” scheduled for a November 10 release via Lobal Orning.
