I don't know anymore what to say as far as some type of introduction to one of Tool's members talking about the new album. Sometime it's right around the corner, sometimes it's coming soon, and sometimes it's far away.
This time it seems to be a mixture of all three of those, as Justin Chancellor tells Bass Player magazine that the band has been working exclusively on one song for the past few months.
"We’re pretty deep into the writing process now, and we’ve narrowed things down to big groups of ideas. For the past few months, we've been working on one of the newer songs fairly exclusively. We get the gist of it and find the main themes that make up the skeleton between verses and choruses. Then we explore different ways we can depart from that and come back to it and flip it upside down, and take the time to see what else is there.
"Everyone knows we take our time. We're really trying to be responsible with ourselves in trying to discover ideas that haven't been discovered before. It's kind of an alchemy, how we experiment."
Chancellor also explained why it takes them so long to write a song:
I wouldn’t say any song comes quickly, but some songs have a simpler theme than others. We get pretty excited by the prospect of a new angle on what we’re doing, and as a result we go down a lot of side roads. To be honest, we enjoy that part of the process most.
As for how the band write their songs:
Adam and I usually have the source material we’ve come up with together here. We’re playing pretty much nonstop right now, so a lot of ideas are coming out. Often, Danny and I will be playing something and Adam will rush into the room and tell us to record it, and then we’ll spend the rest of the day working on it to see if it’s worthwhile. And of course we have a whole treasure chest of ideas on our phones that we record on our own. Basically, Adam and I have riffs and Danny has rhythms or different time-signature beats, and we try to keep them basic before bringing them in to see what the other members will do with them. We establish a riff so we and the listener can identify it, and then we say, Okay, now how far away from it can we go on this journey?
Chancellor also says that they'd like to be done with the new album, and the band sees the impatient nature of its fans as a compliment. So new Tool is coming whenever new Tool is coming. The whole article is worth reading at Bass Player if you like to learn about the gear Justin uses.
Previous Tool album updates can be found here.
