Tool Justin Chancellor インタビュー(2021)
Justin Chancellor氏の証言。
私達の作曲中は、24h中そうだ。かかりきり。
作曲は、私がこのバンドにおいて、細部に最適解を出すまでやり、それはエネルギーの高まりと沈静だ。
Maynardは私たちの音楽からテーマ、想を得るが、殆ど変更がない
*Toolは組み上がった別パートにMaynard vo.ボーカルをつけるとの事
Lateralus期のセッションの初日は、ラウンジルームで遊んで帰った
一つは４年間の面倒なレコード会社関係、一つは前作ツアーでお互いに長く居たからだ→発散。
Toolは分裂的ではなく、全てに首肯ようなプロセス
肯定プロセスでありバンドにおいてはお互いのコミュニケーションありき。
AEnimaに加わった時曲は半分出来ていて、それらを活かすようにした、以降も君の加入が欲しいというようだった
Parabolaの初期バージョンをのぞいて一からの取り込みだった
同僚の先明性がLateralusをmetronome-meltingにした！私が違うフレーズを弾いてポシャろうと思った時、「それいいね！」彼ら
Dannyは予定を組まないタイプだ。彼にもう一本腕が与えられたならそれを使うような人だと思うよ。
Lateralusは実験的で、独立的な自分達の作用の結果だ。Schismなんかも本当におかしいが、偶然の産物なんだ。
私においては拍子とリズムとの格闘
MaynardはAPCのツアーのバスで私達の音楽を一回目に聴いて、そして筆記し始めたらしい
Lateralus（ALBUM）についてMaynard「ヒーリングのテーマ」。
音にMaynardのパートがのって、複雑で無機的なところに調和的な拡がりが。
それらは一人一人異なる過程だ
私達が時間を投じて組み上げたものを別のものにする事はない
記録を遺すのは始まりと終わりのようだ。すべての創造が終わるのだが、新しい何かの起点になる
“It’s the case with a lot of our records, because we spend so much time constructing them,” he begins. “During the time we’re writing, it’s in our head 24 hours a day. Literally. We’re all composers, and that’s part of the process, trying to figure it out internally: you go to sleep with it and you wake up with it.”
“Oh God, just struggling over parts, fighting with each other, coming to a solution,” he reveals. “It was a very, very emotional roller coaster.”
Maynard gets a theme or an idea from the music and very rarely goes back on that it
“We spent the first day in the lounge having it out with each other, kicking and screaming, laughing and crying,” grins Justin. “That whole day, we didn’t go into the tracking room at all.”
There were many tributaries to this “having it out”. One was that Tool were exhausted from weathering a four-year legal case with their former label, Volcano Entertainment. For another, the Ænima tour had also been a classic case of what happens when people “spend too much time together”.
“Tool is not a competition, and it’s not one thing against the other,” he continues. “It’s really all quite complementary in a way.
“It’s really all quite complementary in a way. I know for Maynard, he can express himself in all these different forums to lead out different sides of himself, which I can hear. In the end, you have to come back together and really hash it out. A little time apart is good, but if you’re going to create something together, part of that creativity is communicating with each other and understanding each other.”
“The album before was half-written when I joined,” he says. “So it still had a real feel of the old band, and I was influenced by that a lot so I was trying to try to make it all work with great respect to what they’d done before. This time, they were really like, ‘We want you to help us go somewhere else, we want to become something else with you.’”
With only Parabola having existed in any form previously, Lateralus was Justin’s chance to fully assert his own vision and creativity.
Justin is full of praise for his fellow players’ open-mindedness that made Lateralus’ metronome-melting music possible (“Sometimes I would play something accidentally, that I didn’t want them to hear and they’d go, ‘What’s that? We’re working on that!’”).
“Danny’s just not interested in doing anything by the book,” Justin continues, moving on to appraise Tool’s virtuoso drummer. “If he had another arm, he’d use it, you know? I don’t know if we meant to make Lateralus ‘out there’ in that way; I think it was combination of us being experimental, individually. It was very different from anything I’d heard – stuff like Schism was really weird. The word prog-rock started to be used [to describe it after its release], but to me that’s really accidental. That’s just me fighting with them about time signatures and rhythms.
maynard James Keenan was on the road with A Perfect Circle when he first heard the sounds the rest of his Tool bandmates had been conjuring. In the back of APC’s tour bus, he started putting pen to paper.
In A Perfect Union Of Contrary Things, the frontman describes Lateralus as “a soundtrack for healing”, explaining how it tapped “into the energies that lay in mathematical symmetry – and the position of the planet Saturn”. Referenced on the opening track The Grudge is the theory that every 28 years, Saturn returns to the place it had been at the moment of someone’s birth – a time of endings and new beginnings. “You either let go of past delusions and ascend to the next level, or you sink like a stone,” wrote Maynard. “If you can’t make it past your Saturn return, you remain stagnant.”
Tool had pushed their songcraft like never before musically; Maynard mirrored their efforts in word and melody. For lead single Schism, Justin had fashioned one of the most unique basslines of all time, and it found its match in lyrics that somehow married a line as complex as ‘cold silence has a tendency to atrophy any sense of compassion’ to a gorgeous melody…
“And to a weird time signature as well,” adds Justin. “It’s a beautiful line and I’m glad you brought it up. The music’s very complex, but to have Maynard go, ‘Alright, that’s fine,’ and listen to it studiously and fit words, thoughts and emotions to the scaffold of it is wonderful. It brings the emotion out of the music because, without that, that over-complicated rhythm section or the prog-rockiness of it is a little unemotional. But once the words and the melody of the vocal are on? It’s really nice. My mum loves it, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah! That bit where something blows up and nothing happens on the music, you can make it all work,” he continues. “I don’t know if it’s people hearing the emotion and the spirituality in it, and then trying to explain that, which is sort of the opposite of the purpose of it. You don’t really need to explain it to feel this greater power coming from it. It’s like the four elements come together and makes a fifth, which is, to me, the spiritual side of it, the creative soul of it. I think when people start going back in and trying to dissect it, it almost goes back the opposite way. It’s almost like deconstructing it back down.”
Justin suggests there’s not much to be gained from dismantling what Tool laboured so exhaustively to put together…
“It’s like a birth and a death when you record these albums, you know?” he explains. “It’s almost like a gravestone of all the creativity that led up to it. It’s like an ending, but it’s also a beginning because the thoughts it provokes going forward are for everyone else.”
So what would the gravestone of Lateralus say on it?