Tool producer Joe Barresi revealed the influence Led Zeppelin and ZZ Top had on 2019’s “Fear Inoculum” in a new Let There Be Talk interview.
“And you’ll hear it… I listen to it, and I know I put a vocal in the right speaker here, and it’s really low and barely audible, but I picture someday with headphones someone’s going to go, ‘Holy shit, he says this there!’, or whatever.
“Or there’s something on the drums that Dan [Danny Carey] played where you’re just like, ‘I never knew he was playing a double-kick right there.’ Those little bits, I live for that kind of stuff, all the weird backward shit.
“And when you really start putting your headphones on and getting into what’s happening with the vocal, and the reverbs, and the tails… So there was a lot of ability to do that on the last record.
“On ‘10,000 Days,’ it was more straight-ahead. I mean, they were both done on tape, but ‘10,000 Days’ I approached in a linear fashion.
“The songs were long but they weren’t near as involved as ‘Fear Inoculum.’
“On ‘Fear,’ you can almost break each song down into two or three movements, but on ‘10,000 Days,’ you would put up the pod and go, ‘This is that song,’ or, ‘This is ‘Vicarious’…’
“But then I would listen to it in rehearsal and go, ‘This sounds almost like blues, the way he’s singing, almost like ZZ Top. So why not do some old school shit like put pre-delay on the vocal?’
“So I would store the tape heads instead of tails, and the shit would magnetize, and all those vocal parts that are coming in early just like Led Zeppelin records and stuff.”
“I’m like, ‘That’s just poor tape etiquette but it adds to the flavor of it being old.’ I’m an old dude so I can bring old-school shit to the table.” Ultimate-Guitar transcribed his comments.
