{"id":302251,"date":"2025-10-14T09:15:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T09:15:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/302251\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T09:15:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T09:15:11","slug":"the-album-maynard-james-keenan-was-crucified-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/302251\/","title":{"rendered":"The album Maynard James Keenan was “crucified” for"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Maynard<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Markus Felix)<\/p>\n

Tue 14 October 2025 4:00, UK <\/p>\n

Love him or hate him,\u00a0Maynard James Keenan<\/a>\u00a0has built his entire career on making challenging music that pushes not only artistic boundaries but also delves into lyrical themes that other artists may be too terrified to explore.<\/p>\n

Over the course of three decades together, his main project, Tool<\/a>, have driven metal in a variety of directions that appear more progressive and experimental than what their peers have been producing, and while this has tended to alienate some audiences because of how singular they are within the wider community, it has also helped them find legions of fans and allowed them to create only the music that they believe in, with Keenan being the driving force behind it.<\/p>\n

However, during his downtime from the project, he\u2019s involved himself in a number of other pursuits that have aimed to challenge listeners both with complex compositions and discomforting lyrics. Having formed A Perfect Circle in 1999 with Billy Howerdel, he\u2019s gone on to release four records as the leader of the group, all of which have been uncompromising in their desire to fuse together different strands of musical influence that would otherwise not be explored by metal-adjacent acts.<\/p>\n

While adopting a slightly more art rock-influenced sound than Tool, A Perfect Circle\u2019s first two records, Mer de Noms and Thirteenth Step aren\u2019t exactly a million miles away from his previous ventures, but the third record they made together took a vastly different approach that saw the band focus on adapting the work of others and place more emphasis on the subject matter rather than their songwriting.<\/p>\n

The 2004 album, Emotive, consisted entirely of covers of other songs, bar one original, featuring curious reworkings of tracks such as John Lennon\u2019s \u2018Imagine\u2019 and Devo\u2019s<\/a> \u2018Freedom of Choice\u2019. While neither of these seems close together in terms of style, with them both existing far from the world that A Perfect Circle worked within, what they and the other nine covers have in common is a political theme, with Keenan explicitly stating that he wanted it to be a \u2018protest album\u2019.<\/p>\n

However, it was always going to be a risk doing an album of covers with a unifying political theme, and it polarised listeners upon release. \u201cI tested the water with the political album A Perfect Circle did,\u201d Keenan admitted in a 2006 interview with The AV Club. \u201cI didn\u2019t even write those songs; I was just letting people hear what was said before me, the things that inspired me as a child, and things that were said during various turbulent times, and I was fucking crucified.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the record still has plenty of detractors, Keenan insists that his audience weren\u2019t ready to hear these important messages, nor were they interested in his bizarre reimaginings of them. \u201cIf you go back and listen to that album and just forget that it\u2019s covers, it\u2019s a good album,\u201d he concluded, \u201cbut I was crucified because of its content, because there\u2019s an army of little fucking brats out there just going into every little chat room, talking shit and undermining anybody who has anything to say.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Markus Felix) Tue 14 October 2025 4:00, UK Love him or hate him,\u00a0Maynard James…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":302252,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[153547,171,153548,975,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-302251","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-a-perfect-circle","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-maynard-james-keenan","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115371765347206375","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}