Maynard James Keenan

James Herbert Keenan was born in Akron, Ohio, on April 17, 1964, the only child of Southern Baptist parents. They divorced in 1968 and he moved with his mother to Ravenna, Ohio, into what he has described as an “intolerant and unworldly household”. When he was eleven his mother suffered a paralyzing brain haemorrhage, an event that would later feed songs by Tool and A Perfect Circle. In his teens he moved to live with his father in Scottville, Michigan, “the best move [he] ever made”, and graduated from Mason County Central High School in 1982, a member of the wrestling team.

Inspired by Bill Murray in Stripes, he joined the United States Army, meaning to let the G.I. Bill pay for art school. He served as a forward observer, then went to West Point Prep from 1983 to 1984, where he wrestled, ran cross country and sang in the glee club. He took the name “Maynard” in the military, on a whim, from a character he had invented in high school. He turned down an appointment to West Point, because he doubted it would tolerate his dissidence, and studied art at the Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids.

Keenan and the guitarist Adam Jones met through a mutual friend in 1989. After Keenan played him a tape of his previous band, Jones was so struck by the voice that he talked him into starting a new one. Danny Carey, the drummer, lived above Keenan and was introduced to Jones by Tom Morello, an old high-school friend of Jones; he started playing in their sessions because he “felt kinda sorry for them”, with other musicians not showing up. A friend of Jones brought in the bassist Paul D’Amour. Keenan has said that Tool is exactly what it sounds like: something to be used as a catalyst, in finding out whatever you need to find out.

After nearly two years of playing around Los Angeles they signed to Zoo Entertainment, and in March 1992 Zoo put out Opiate, six tracks and seven songs, the “hardest sounding” they had written. Two of its songs were recorded live, with an audience, at the Jellö Loft in Hollywood on New Year’s Eve 1991. The first video, for “Hush”, had the band naked with Parental Advisory stickers over their genitals and duct tape over their mouths, a protest against the Parents Music Resource Center. They toured with Rollins Band, Fishbone, Rage Against the Machine, White Zombie and Corrosion of Conformity.

It came out when grunge was at its height, and it took some songs the band had left off Opiate when they chose to go heavy. It is the only Tool album with D’Amour on bass. Jones designed the art, with a ribcage sculpture of his on the front, and the comedian Bill Hicks is thanked in the liner notes as an inspiration; it is the only Tool album made while he was alive. Photographs in the booklet, of a nude obese woman, a nude thin man and the band with pins in the sides of their heads, got it pulled from Kmart and Walmart, so the band put out a second version with a giant barcode and a mail-in form for the original artwork.

The band toured again, apart from one night in May 1993 when they found the Hollywood venue belonged to the Church of Scientology, and Keenan spent most of the show baa-ing at the audience like a sheep. They played Lollapalooza, were moved up to the main stage, and at the Los Angeles show Hicks introduced them. The album was gold by September 1993 and platinum by 1995, and “Sober” won Billboard’s Best Video by a New Artist. The next single, “Prison Sex”, with lyrics and a Jones video about child abuse, was judged too graphic by MuchMusic, and MTV stopped showing it after a few airings.

In September 1995 D’Amour left, amicably, to pursue other projects, and Justin Chancellor, of Peach, a band that had toured with them, took over the bass during the sessions. The album was dedicated to Bill Hicks, who had died two and a half years earlier and whom the band felt was “resonating similar concepts”: a clip of him comes before “Third Eye”, and the title song and the lenticular case both nod to his routine about Los Angeles falling into the Pacific. The name joins anima, Jung’s word for the soul, with enema.

Radio shortened “Stinkfist”, its lyrics were altered, and MTV renamed the video “Track No. 1”; the host of 120 Minutes waved a fist in front of his face on air and explained the change. It debuted at No. 2, was triple platinum by 2003 and won the Grammy for Best Metal Performance for “Ænema”. Tool headlined Lollapalooza ’97 and co-headlined Ozzfest in 1998, on the condition that the Melvins came too.

Two fights then kept Tool from a new record. Volcano, the successor to Zoo, said the band broke its contract by listening to other labels’ offers; Tool countersued, and they settled out of court, signing a three-record deal in December 1998. In 2000 the band fired its manager, Ted Gardner, who sued over his commission. In between, Keenan took a break. In 1997 he had sung as “Gaylord C.” on “Choked”, a track on the drum compilation Flyin’ Traps, with Tim Alexander of Primus and Mike Bordin of Faith No More. Now Jones played with Buzz Osborne of the Melvins and Carey with Jello Biafra on the side, and Keenan joined A Perfect Circle, started by Billy Howerdel, Tool’s guitar tech. The rest of Tool kept writing and waited for him to come back.

Rumours that the band had split were put to rest by Salival in 2000, a limited box set on CD with VHS or DVD, with a 56-page book. It has a new track, a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter”, a live version of “You Lied” by Chancellor’s old band Peach, live takes of “Pushit”, “Third Eye” and “Part of Me”, and music videos.

Billy Howerdel had been a guitar tech for Nine Inch Nails, the Smashing Pumpkins, Fishbone and Tool. He met Keenan in 1992, when Tool opened for Fishbone, and in 1995 Keenan offered him a room in his North Hollywood house. He played Keenan his demos, and Keenan said, “I can hear myself singing [those songs]”. Howerdel had first wanted Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, who was unavailable, and agreed that Keenan would be a good fit. With Paz Lenchantin on bass and violin, Troy Van Leeuwen on guitar and Tim Alexander of Primus on drums, they played their first show in Los Angeles in August 1999 and Coachella that October, by which time Josh Freese had Alexander’s drum stool. Keenan chose Virgin over Volcano, Tool’s label, because Virgin understood that this was no minor side project.

The title is French for “sea of names”, and the symbols on the cover read “La Cascade des Prénoms”, the waterfall of first names. Songs are named after people Keenan knew: “Judith” carries the name of his mother, and “Renholdër” is “Re:D.Lohner” backwards, for the guitarist Danny Lohner, who did not know it was about him. It debuted at No. 4, the highest first-album debut for a rock band at the time, and was platinum by October. They opened for Nine Inch Nails, played the Summersault tour in Canada and headlined for months, and Keenan took to wearing wigs in public.

In January 2001 the band announced a record called Systema Encéphale, with a twelve-song track list: “Riverchrist”, “Numbereft”, “Encephatalis”. It was a ruse; file-sharing networks filled with fake files under those names, and a month later the real title came out. Lateralus, supposedly after a leg muscle and lateral thinking, was the first record after the four-year fight with their label. It runs 79 minutes: the manufacturer, Carey said, would only guarantee up to 79 minutes, and “We thought we’d give them two seconds of breathing room.”

It went straight to No. 1 with over 555,000 copies, and “Schism” won the Grammy for Best Metal Performance. They toured with King Crimson for ten shows in August 2001. David Bottrill later said the first version of the lyrics of “Schism” was bluntly about the tension between Keenan and Jones, until a long band meeting led Keenan to write them to fit any relationship falling apart.

Mer de Noms had been mostly written before there was a band. This time they started from scratch, apart from “Vanishing”, meant for the first record; Howerdel had saved the file as “test”, lost it and found it again in 2001, which is why it is called “Vanishing”. Howerdel sent instrumentals while Keenan toured Lateralus and wrote lyrics between shows. Lenchantin left for Zwan, Van Leeuwen for Queens of the Stone Age, and Jeordie White and Danny Lohner filled in; James Iha joined to tour.

When Keenan came back in person he vetoed and reworked ideas: he wanted to avoid another hard-rock record, which he thought would be “redundant”, and pushed for atmosphere, while Howerdel preferred the heavier songs he had written while he waited. White, new to the band, was the go-between. It is a concept album about addiction and recovery, and the title is a reference to the twelve-step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous. Keenan, who has not struggled with addiction himself, wrote from friends’ lives, among them Layne Staley of Alice in Chains, who died in 2002.

At an Axis of Justice benefit in July 2004 Keenan announced that the band would put out a collection of political cover songs. Howerdel and Keenan had talked about a covers record early in the Thirteenth Step tour and doubted they had a reason for one; Keenan’s criticism of President George W. Bush supplied it. He said it was less “anti-Bush” than “anti-political apathy”, a push to get people to read up and take part. They recorded from late June to early September to be out before the election. Ten of the twelve songs are covers, from Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” to “When the Levee Breaks”, most of them rebuilt until they were nearly unrecognisable, with Howerdel singing lead on about a third.

Critics and fans were more divided than before. It debuted at No. 2, with about 90,000 fewer copies sold than Thirteenth Step, and went gold. The band did not tour it, and went on hiatus. Years later Keenan said he had “tested the waters” and was “crucified” for it. Two weeks after it came out they put out aMOTION, a CD and DVD of remixes and videos.

It was made without David Bottrill, partly at Grandmaster, where Undertow was recorded. It is heavier than Lateralus, which the band put down to Fantômas, who toured with them before they wrote it. Jones used a “pipe bomb mic”, a guitar pickup in a brass cylinder, and a talk box on “Jambi”; Carey played electronic Mandala drums. The packaging has stereoscopic glasses to read its 3-D art by Alex Grey, and it won the Grammy for Best Recording Package.

Keenan wanted this one to be more personal. The title refers to the time his mother, Judith Marie, lived paralysed after her brain haemorrhage: 27 years, about 10,000 days, until her death in 2003. “Wings for Marie” and “10,000 Days (Wings Pt 2)” are about her. He also said it was about Saturn’s return, which he described as the chance in your late twenties to let go of old patterns. It debuted at No. 1 with 564,000 copies, and in the UK at No. 4, the band’s highest there. Reviews were warm but cooler than Lateralus’s; Pitchfork said Tool had made “an…A Perfect Circle record”.

Puscifer first appeared as a fictional band on Mr. Show, with Keenan as its singer, and its first release under the name was a “Rev 22:20” mix in 2003 on the Underworld soundtrack, a collaboration with Danny Lohner. In 2006 it added “The Undertaker (Renholdër Mix)” to Underworld: Evolution. Keenan later called it his “creative subconscious”, “a playground for the various voices in my head”.

He made the first album on a tour bus, in hotel rooms and in studios around the country while he toured with Tool, and paid for it himself. Keenan said it was like “driving around in your car listening to those old Motown hits, James Brown, and cool R&B stuff”. It is electronic, a long way from Tool; Tim Alexander, who played on it, called it “trancy and hypnotic” and a “total 180 from Tool”. Critics found it unfocused beside his other work. It debuted at No. 25, and at No. 1 on the Independent Albums chart.

The second Puscifer album was recorded in Jerome, Arizona, in the spring of 2011, with the tracking done among the wine barrels from Keenan’s Caduceus Cellars. Mat Mitchell and Josh Eustis produced with him, and Carina Round, Juliette Commagere, Matt McJunkins, Jeff Friedl, Jonny Polonsky, Tim Alexander, Jon Theodore and his son Devo, on cello, played on it. “Man Overboard” was the first single, on July 19.

On the cover Keenan and the comedian Laura Milligan appear in character as Billy D. and Hildy Berger, the only time his full face has appeared on the cover of a studio album. It debuted at No. 27 with 12,111 copies. Gregory Heaney of AllMusic called it “a fine piece of cold weather headphone music”. Puscifer toured the fall and winter of 2011 further across the United States than before.

A Perfect Circle had been dormant since eMOTIVe. Then in June 2010 Keenan was to sing “Bohemian Rhapsody” at E3 with Queen’s Brian May, who cancelled at the last minute. Howerdel was nearby, and played guitar instead. It went well enough that both wanted to play together again. In September 2010 the band announced the end of its hiatus: five cities, three nights each, each night one of their three albums in order, most of eMOTIVe heard live for the first time. A North American tour followed in 2011, with Jeff Friedl on drums after the first show. Josh Freese announced in October 2012 that he was leaving for good.

Meanwhile Puscifer put out Donkey Punch the Night on February 19, 2013, an EP with two new songs, “Breathe” and “Dear Brother”, covers of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Accept’s “Balls to the Wall”, and remixes; reviews were mixed. That year it played its first dates outside North America, in Australia and at Lollapalooza in Brazil and Chile. Tool toured in January and February 2012 and played Ozzfest Japan in 2013, while the fifth album waited on lawsuits and, in 2013, accidents.

It was announced on July 29, 2015 with “Grand Canyon”, its first single. Carina Round sings lead on most of the songs, which Exclaim found more focused than Conditions of My Parole, with the “consistent desert-weary feel” a plus. Mat Mitchell, Jeff Friedl, Jon Theodore, Matt McJunkins and Juliette Commagere play on it; Tim Alexander drums on one track. The vinyl has an exclusive mix of “Simultaneous” with Daniel Ash of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets, narrating the first part.

Puscifer took it to the UK and Europe in 2016, as the “Money Shot Heard Around The World” tour, and to Australia and New Zealand in January 2017. A remix album, Money Shot Your Re-Load, came out on November 25, 2016, with remixes by, among others, Tool’s bassist Justin Chancellor.

Work on new songs reaches back to 2008, and for years it crept: Howerdel wrote and demoed, Keenan asked him to cut the songs up and start over, and they disagreed over a full album against single songs. Work in earnest began in late 2016, with Keenan free of Tool, Puscifer and the harvest at Caduceus Cellars, and the official start in February 2017, with an outside producer for the first time, Dave Sardy. Keenan sang in his home studio with Mat Mitchell, and they sent files back and forth. They toured in 2017, to push themselves to finish, and signed with BMG, their first deal in thirteen years, which gave them full artistic control.

Keenan wrote all the lyrics, about accountability and the state of society, and sang all the vocals; Howerdel played the guitar, keyboards and nearly all the bass, and four drummers were credited together as “The APC drum orchestra”. The title song began as one of Howerdel’s Ashes Divide songs; he said it was written after two people close to him died by suicide, and he co-wrote an early version with Chester Bennington, for Linkin Park, until it was dropped from that album. Bennington died in July 2017. Keenan wrote entirely new lyrics. The album debuted at No. 3 and the band toured it through 2018. The box set had a holographic film by Steven Sebring.

After 10,000 Days Keenan said he saw Tool breaking up, and turned to Puscifer, but in early 2008 told MTV the band would start writing “right away”. For years Jones, Chancellor and Carey worked on instrumentals while Keenan waited to write over them, as he always does. A lawsuit from 2007, over a friend’s claim to artwork the band had used, grew into a fight with an insurance company; it ended in 2015. Keenan likened the album’s progress, around 2013, to “noodles in a big basket. Lots of noodles, just no dishes”.

The band went into a studio with Joe Barresi on March 10, 2018. Keenan recorded his vocals during the 2018 wine harvest at Caduceus Cellars, and Barresi and the engineer Mat Mitchell went to his house in Arizona to do it. The album has seven main tracks, close to the 80 minutes a CD holds. Tool put its catalogue on the streaming services on August 2, and the title song, 10:21 long, became the longest ever to enter the Hot 100. It debuted at No. 1, a third in a row, and “7empest” won the Grammy for Best Metal Performance.

Puscifer’s fourth album, made at Puscifer Studios in North Hollywood, was produced and engineered by Mat Mitchell, who with Carina Round was credited as a permanent member for the first time. Keenan appears on it as “Dick Merkin”. The lead single and video, “Apocalyptical”, came out on May 8, 2020, and the album was announced on September 17.

Metacritic gave it an average of 80 from seven reviews, and it debuted at No. 7 on the Top Alternative Albums chart. On its release day Puscifer put out a limited streaming concert film of the whole album, filmed in and around Arcosanti, Arizona, with Keenan and Round, Mitchell, Greg Edwards and Gunnar Olsen.

In June 2020 Tool cancelled its North American tour, and that August Carey said the band was on hiatus. On October 27 an instrumental, “The Witness”, came out, credited to Jones, not the band. On March 1, 2022 Tool re-recorded “Opiate” as “Opiate²”, almost twice as long, with a video by Dominic Hailstone on March 18 for the EP’s 30th anniversary. Carey said they were already working on a sixth album, and “it won’t take us this long for the next one”.

In late 2021 Keenan said 2022 would be for Puscifer, with Howerdel putting out a solo album, What Normal Was. In April 2024 A Perfect Circle returned to touring, with a run of shows with Puscifer and Primus. Just before it started they put out “Kindred”, their first new song in six years, on Sessanta E.P.P.P., a split EP with one song each from them, Puscifer and Primus. Josh Freese came back to drum on it, for the first time in thirteen years.

Wikipedia gives Puscifer’s Normal Isn’t one line: it was released on February 6, 2026, and Keenan appears as his goth alter ego “Bellendia Black”. His own page names it with Money Shot and Existential Reckoning among the albums Puscifer has published.

Puscifer’s official members are Keenan, Mat Mitchell and Carina Round. Gunnar Olsen plays drums on tour, and Josh Moreau has played bass in 2022 and again from 2025, after Greg Edwards, who played with the band from 2020 to 2025.

Keenan lives in Arizona and makes wine. His grandparents and great-uncle made wine in northern Italy, and he owns Caduceus Cellars and Merkin Vineyards, near Sedona, and the cellar in Jerome. The winery is named for the ancient symbol of commerce, the vineyard for a pubic wig. Not long after it opened he began scheduling records, promotion and tours around its busiest weeks: “I’ve gotta be in Arizona for the harvesting and processing, and then I’ll need to be back there again for the bottling.” In 2010 the documentary Blood Into Wine followed him and Eric Glomski making wine in the Verde Valley.

His mother’s ashes were scattered over one of his vineyards, and he named a Cabernet Sauvignon after her, Nagual del Judith, the first wine made entirely from his own grapes. Of A Perfect Circle’s plans, Howerdel said they would write and record as touring allowed. In May 2026 the band released “Starless”, ahead of a European and UK tour, and on September 29, 2026 “To Whom It May Concern”, with the announcement of a large North American tour for 2027. Tool, for its part, has a sixth album in writing: in early 2026 Carey said it was “hopefully” for 2027, perhaps with a residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas.