Maynard James Keenan: Fear Inoculum We Had The Record in 2011 It Was Fantastic

On Friday, Tool finally gave fans their first album in 13 years, Fear Inoculum. The long and arduous wait for fans culminated in an 86-minute odyssey that satiated fans and critics alike. Now, Maynard James Keenan has revealed that, realistically, we could have had the record in 2011, since it was “fantastic eight years ago.”

In a recent appearance on the BBC Radio 1 radio show with Daniel P. Carter. Maynard James Keenan delved into the psychology behind the thirteen-year break of the band between records.

“I think a lot of it [was] just that age where you want it to be right and we’ve had some success in the past, and the fear of this thing coming out and not being accepted — the fear that it’s not as good as it can be — that can be detrimentally crippling,” he explained.. “If I had to ‘psychology 101’ [it], I would have to say, ‘Well, yeah, that’s why it would take 13 years to write something, because you’re paranoid that it’s not gonna be the best that it can be and then you second guess every single step that you make,’ when it was probably good enough — I shouldn’t say good enough — it was fantastic eight years ago.”

Keenan revealed that the second-guessing and overanalysing resulted in the wait,

“But then the crippling second-guessing of yourself sets in, and that psychology and that spiral you get in, it can be extremely daunting. And you can actually not even feel it happening. All of a sudden you wake up and it’s 13 years later. The hard part is accepting the fact that maybe you’re not as important as you think you are and you should probably just get on with it.”