TOOL Has "20 Potential Song Ideas," Guitarist Confirms "Descending" Is Part Of A New Song

About a week ago, we posted up some footage from a recent Tool gig and said that a jam that took place between songs was actually a new song called "Descending." The information came from a lot of different places, though now Tool guitarist Adam Jones confirms that what you heard was definitely a new song and that the working title for it is indeed "Descending" in an interview with Rolling Stone:

Yeah, it's a working title. We have a song that's probably about 13 or 14 minutes long, so what we've done with it is … I don't want to call it a "best of," but it's a shortened, different approach to it. It is a new song. It's like a vague movie trailer to the real movie [laughs]. Sometimes we do jamming between songs or some kind of segues, and it's usually involved in some kind of new material. But that one's just a little taste of things to come … It's one of those things, too, where we're playing this "movie trailer" version of it and we just want to go into the main part of it. The main part's the best part, I think, but we just don't want to give that away yet. We're just doing a little taste test all the way through and put it together.

Jones also states that the band has about "20 potential song ideas now" and that the band is working together on new material. Jones also says not to believe the Internet, which is probably the best advice he can give at this point as well.

I don't know if you should believe everything you read. The Internet can be really great but the Internet can also be like the National Enquirer. People take things out of context and don't understand jokes.

Jones seems so excited in this interview too, like he's genuinely stoked on what the band is doing at this point. But what about Maynard? Has he even written any vocals yet?

Has Maynard heard the music?
Yeah. We have an FTP and a Dropbox and we’re in communication. He’s got other stuff he does, so we keep him in the loop, and he has written lyrics, but he’s still working on that and he’ll commit. The best thing for all of us is when the song is done. I don’t write leads until the song is done. You want to get a vibe. And Maynard can work on lyrics, but until the song’s done and he knows how the end is, he’s still figuring out the flow.

The thing with Tool is you have four critical thinkers who like different stuff, so our process is not an easy one but it’s a very rewarding one. So yes, he is exposed to new music. It’s always been this way and it probably will always be this way and it’s just how people work.

So we'll see what happens in 2016, though it sounds like we'll actually get to hear some new music then as well!