Maynard James Keenan won’t sing certain Tool songs because “the words are just dumb” and “the lyrics don’t hold up under scrutiny”

Maynard James Keenan has said he does not want to sing some Tool songs as “the words are just dumb” and “don’t hold up to scrutiny”.

The frontman appeared as a guest on Jackass star Steve-O’s podcast Wilde Ride! this week, and the host informed him that an AI search had described Tool’s music as “reverent”, causing Keenan to scoff.

“Yeah, I don’t know about that…reverence for fist fucking??” he responded, in a wry nod to the 1996 Tool classic ‘Stinkfist’.

Keenan added: “There’s some old Tool songs that I don’t like playing them because I feel like I failed them. They’re popular songs, but I was trying to make a joke and it was a dumb joke, and I should’ve just moved on. I feel like the lyrics don’t hold up under scrutiny.”

He referenced ‘4 Degrees’ from debut album ‘Undertow’, adding: “The way I wrote it… I was trying to fucking make a butt sex joke and it was dumb. The song’s beautiful, what those guys did musically is great and I think maybe the melody’s a good melody but the words are just dumb. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking.”

Tool have not released an album since 2019’s ‘Fear Inoculum’, but they did tour in late 2025, playing a host of live deep cuts, as well as a cover of Black Sabbath’s ‘Hand Of Doom’.

Keenan and Adam Jones did share an update on any potential new material from Tool last year too. When asked what they have in store for 2025, Keenan said: “Writing, I guess.”

In 2024, Tool’s Justin Chancellor spoke to NME about fans’ fanaticism with the band and whether new material could arrive as a series of singles.

“It definitely comes on our own terms,” he said. “The only pressure comes when we announce that we’re working on something new, because then we have to make our own predictions for when it’ll come out, and obviously you feel like you let people down if you don’t release it in a certain amount of time.”

“When it comes to writing new music, we’re aware that people don’t manage to stay together for as long as we have, so the pure fact that we’ve made it this far makes us eager to take it to the next place and create something new. Whether we’ll be able to successfully, who knows? We’re pretty sure we can, but Tool’s approach has always been experimental, so we never quite know how it’ll come together.”

One Tool fan that has been making headlines in American free solo climber Alex Honnold, who successfully scaled one of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, Taipei 101, while listening to the band.

One of Maynard’s other bands Puscifer, meanwhile, are releasing their new album ‘Normal Isn’t’ on February 6.

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