A PERFECT CIRCLE at 25: MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN and BILLY HOWERDEL look back and ahead

Maynard James Keenan chose to suffer like this.

He’s collapsed onto a couch and is practically horizontal, catching his breath at a rehearsal space in North Hollywood, California, where this man with the shaved head is bearing the weight of another season of music creation and all the contract negotiations and promotion that comes with it.

It’s April 2000, and Keenan is known to the world as the mysterious, explosive singer from TOOL, a band of shadowy textures and epic sweep, platinum sales and heavy rotation on MTV and rock radio. But TOOL isn’t why he’s here approaching exhaustion.

Keenan is engaged with a new band called A Perfect Circle, which he insists is not a side-project but a real commitment. That explains the recent major-label bidding war for the group, and this week’s multiday shoot with filmmaker David Fincher, director of Se7en and Fight Club, for a music video of the band’s deeply emotional debut single, “Judith.”

“All my energy is on this,” Keenan insists, looking up from the couch. With TOOL distracted by lawsuits and in no hurry to complete a new album that’s still a year away, the singer finds himself with a gaping hole in his schedule. “There’s plenty of time to do this project.”

Sitting across from Keenan is a new collaborator, guitarist and composer Billy Howerdel, who’s at the moment still a relatively unknown creative force. Howerdel has spent most of the last decade as an in-demand guitar tech and computer whiz on the road and in the studio for Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie, Guns N’ Roses and TOOL.

During those same years, he’s privately been piecing together his own unheard music in studios and bedroom recordings, making sounds at times heavy and grinding but also with a delicate touch, colliding muscle with Howerdel’s weakness for the post-punk and darkwave sounds of the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

The guitarist, who stands six feet three with a shaved head, is also catching his breath from all the activity. Together, in a nearby suburban house they share, Keenan and Howerdel completed A Perfect Circle’s debut album, Mer De Noms. The music is powerful but very different from the growling alt-prog-metal of TOOL, with a gloomier shimmer amid eruptions of eccentric guitar.

That sound is epitomized by “Judith” — a profoundly personal song for Keenan, whose lyrics are equally raging and wounded and were inspired by the tragedy of his devoutly religious mother, who was paralyzed when he was a boy. Destined to be a rock hit, the song represents one of the most vulnerable performances of his career, which he delivered in reaction to Howerdel’s music.

“It seemed really emotional. There were a lot of elements that I responded to — where I could explore shadow aspects of myself,” Keenan says, of how the guitarist’s evocative composition influenced his vocals. “It was always there. But now the door’s unlocked.”

Today, Billy Howerdel still looks the same as he did in that rehearsal studio years ago — a little older, but still lean with a shaved head. He’s dressed in black while relaxing on a white couch in his private studio, which is located 10 minutes away from the house he recorded APC’s debut. The converted barn is an elegantly organized space, all clean lines and a dark wooden floor, with a large computer console and keyboard placed near his Marshall stack.

A Perfect Circle turned 25 in 2024 and celebrated with their first live shows since 2018, joining Keenan’s 60th birthday tour, Sessanta, alongside Puscifer and Primus. 2025 looks even more eventful, between the Sessanta V2.0 spring run and, with luck, a new album in the works. Simply put: Howerdel is increasingly busy once again.

The timing is good. Howerdel’s obsession with guitar playing was recently reignited while teaching his 16-year-old son. “I’ve played more in the past six months than I’ve played in 25 years,” he says. “I’m kind of teaching him how to play and, funnily enough, playing a lot of TOOL.”

The house Howerdel once shared with Keenan has long since been bulldozed and replaced by apartment buildings. But A Perfect Circle is again an ongoing concern — whenever it finds a place within Keenan’s schedule, which is stacked with his duties in TOOL and Puscifer, along with obligations to his winemaking enterprise and several other businesses around his home base of Jerome, Arizona. “I just let him steer the ship,” Howerdel says. “He’s the one with the busy schedule. I’m here when he is ready.”

Still, Howerdel admits, “I’m envious of people who have a band that does a tour and a record, takes six months off and starts making another record. I very much would prefer that. That wasn’t the way this was wired.”

When he and Keenan first met in 1991, TOOL was not a major name. Their breakout debut, Undertow, was still two years away. They were merely a promising new band opening on a month-long tour of France for Fishbone, the crazed Los Angeles punk-funk-rock outfit. Howerdel was Fishbone’s guitar tech. TOOL were traveling in a van and Keenan remembers the no-budget road trip being “quite grueling,” with musicians and crew depending a little too much on the sad bowl of gazpacho that club owners typically left on a counter for them backstage.

“It was hot and we got through it,” says Howerdel of the summer trek. “You bond in that situation.”

During most of those years, few people heard the music Howerdel was creating — but those who did took notice. Back on that 1991 tour, Fishbone guitarist Kendall Jones met Howerdel for dinner in the hotel lobby one night. Jones had something urgent to tell him.

“He goes, ‘What the hell are you working for me for?’ And I was like, What?,” Howerdel recalls. “This is a very potent moment in my life: He’s just like, ‘I’ve heard some of your stuff. Why aren’t you doing that?’”

From that moment on, Howerdel was determined to pursue his own music more seriously, even as he worked demanding tech gigs for major tours.

Howerdel grew up in New Jersey and came to L.A. to immerse himself in the music world, then in the waning days of hair metal on the Sunset Strip, as revolutionary new sounds emerged across town. “It was a very cool time in L.A.,” Howerdel recalls. “Jane’s Addiction were already supreme by ’91 when I got here. [Then] there was Rage Against the Machine and TOOL. I’d go to Raji’s and these little bars and clubs and see this thing that was percolating. I had no idea it was going to become big.”

A few years later, Howerdel broke up with his girlfriend and was moving out of their place just outside of L.A. He drove into Hollywood with all his belongings. The plan was to find a hotel room and figure out his future. But then he stopped at the bar and sometime rock club the Opium Den, formerly known as the Gaslight, and ran into Keenan. The singer had a spare room in his rented house in North Hollywood and invited Howerdel to move in.

The place was a Tudor-style three-bedroom house with a huge backyard, tall trees and a koi pond. A section of the kitchen was put behind chicken wire and made into a home for several live birds, including finches and an African grey parrot. The roots of one tree were lifting up the front of the house, where Howerdel’s bedroom was located.

At the time, TOOL was stalled in the making of the follow-up to their 1996 sophomore album, Ænima, entangled in lawsuits with their label and former manager. Even with that going on, Keenan was anxious to keep making music. Howerdel’s day job was working in the studio with Axl Rose as the Guns N’ Roses leader labored to finish Chinese Democracy.

“TOOL was involved in some lawsuit stuff, and some arguments, and it seemed like all of that was taking precedence over just gutting it out and finding some discipline and writing songs in the middle of all that shit,” Keenan recalls. “I can multitask. They’re not going to do it, so I’ve got to find an outlet.”

The answer was right there in his living room. He heard some compelling music Howerdel had made and could imagine his voice as part of it. With lots of time on his hands, the singer proposed a new band.

“He had a bunch of pieces together,” Keenan remembers. “It evolved into a slightly different thing, just because he was listening to how I was reacting to the songs.”

The bulk of their sessions took place at night, but included momentary pauses for overhead traffic from the Burbank Airport. Keenan’s vocals were recorded in the garage, which had a roof caving in and a “possum living above us and chewing through the wires,” he says with a laugh. To Howerdel, hearing Keenan’s voice on his tracks “was like goosebump time.”

This was a major period of transition for Keenan in other ways. He had just moved his main residence to Jerome, where he would ultimately build a separate existence as an Arizona winemaker and business owner. (Though he’d kept his room at the house with Howerdel for frequent trips to L.A.)

He’d been introduced to the former copper mining town by Primus drummer Tim “Herb” Alexander, and for a while they were neighbors there. By the time Keenan recruited Alexander for the nascent stage of A Perfect Circle, playing their earliest gigs and on demo recordings, the drummer was living in the Bay Area. When Alexander came down to L.A. to work with what would become A Perfect Circle, he slept on an air mattress in Keenan’s kitchen.

A Perfect Circle played their first show on the Sunset Strip at a benefit for singer Keith Morris — the SoCal punk-rock icon known for his time in Black Flag and Circle Jerks, who was newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Fundraisers at the Whisky a Go Go and the Viper Room drew the support of many bands and became a setting for Keenan to share the work he was doing with his new projects.

At the Whisky, Keenan performed with an early version of Puscifer. Then he walked across the street to the Viper Room to debut his new, still-unnamed band with Howerdel. The songs had never before been performed live, and Keenan read many lyrics from a sheet of paper. The seven-song set ended with an early rendition of “Judith” — a recording from that night reveals that the music sounded close to its final form, though the lyrics were still evolving.

“This is our last song, and it’s not a joke so don’t laugh,” Keenan said from the stage.

Afterwards, the burgeoning band toured a series of small rooms. Alexander served as both drummer and driver of their van, which broke down along the way. “It was like starting all over again, driving with your gear up the 101 on the West Coast,” remembers Alexander, who had recently quit Primus (as he would again in late 2024). Keenan’s approach to APC was developing, the drummer recalls. “He was using that time to feel out the lyrics, the vocals, the melodies, to see how they fit with the music.”

As he exists now, Keenan is a man who has mastered the complicated balance between his many pursuits. He successfully juggles three bands actively recording and touring, plus a winery and other businesses in Jerome, not to mention having a wife and family and baby ducks to consider — all while earning a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. In 2024, multitasking seems to come easy to him. But when A Perfect Circle was emerging, he was a frustrated rock star looking for another outlet, and had none of that figured out yet.

“You don’t really know how that’s gonna go,” says Keenan. “You hear nightmares of record labels getting involved and acting like there’s some ownership of your soul to them. And then band members getting a little upset that you’re doing other things. But you only have so many years. You can’t waste them.”

APC recorded without the help or input of a label or other outside pressures. It was purely the product of their own creative vision, which was self-funded before signing with Virgin Records.

“Back then, you didn’t have direct access to releasing records. There was nobody in the distribution chain that was going to take your call,” Keenan says. “You could go the full Fugazi route and sell it to your fucking roommates — or the [other] extreme, which is going through a major label, which is always daunting because they do not have your best interest in mind. Never have, never will. It’s like trusting the government. We initially just had a record, then we had to shop it, and then take two steps back and fight with my existing label to get them to sign off on me even doing it. That was an awful conversation.”

Keenan had also invited Rob Halford of Judas Priest to come by their home studio to hang out and get a glimpse of the new project. When they played Halford a half-dozen tracks, the Metal God’s reaction was immediate. He pointed to the song that would later be called “Judith” and told them, “If you release that song first, you’ll sell a million records on that song alone.”

The track was layered with tension and driven by Howerdel’s strange bottleneck-slide patterns. Keenan’s vocal was fueled by frustration and rage, shouting his lyrics to the heavens: “Praise the one who left you broken down and paralyzed/He did it all for you!”

Things took on a life of their own as he recorded that vocal. “I was resisting it going that intense on the work we were doing,” Keenan says of the especially personal and heavy subject matter about his mother. “I was looking to maybe mute some of those vibes.” In that, he failed.

Though they’d been leaning toward the alternately driving and atmospheric “3 Libras” as the first single for Mer De Noms, APC ultimately went with Halford’s advice. “We took it to heart and just thought about it more,” says Howerdel. “I got more excited about the song. It was someone validating something and you hearing it through different ears, seeing it through different eyes.”

APC released their debut album Mer De Noms — featuring the lead single “Judith” — in May 2000. As Halford predicted, it was an auspicious debut. The record reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200 — the highest-ever debut for a rock band’s first album — and would go on to be certified platinum.

For TOOL fans still waiting for a follow up to Ænima, the arrival of Keenan’s new band was both alarming and exciting. Here was the sound of Keenan uncoiled, anguished and shattered with grief over layers of evocative guitar and effects.

The album also included “Orestes,” which was built upon big guitar flourishes and atmosphere, rising from a gentle, dreamy melody towards a storm of passion and muscular beats. For Howerdel, the song encapsulated the guitarist-composer’s artistic vision for the project. “This is what A Perfect Circle is,” he recalls thinking. “That’s the North Star.”

If Keenan’s partners in TOOL were uneasy by his new band coming together, it didn’t show. In fact, the singer and Howerdel spent a day jamming through some of the songs with TOOL drummer Danny Carey and bassist Justin Chancellor at TOOL’s practice spot in Hollywood. “They were supportive of it, it seemed like,” Howerdel says. “They had heard some stuff.”

Though Howerdel had been piecing the tracks together even before there was a band, additional players were added to the mix once Keenan formally joined the project. A Perfect Circle took their name from the opening verse of “Orestes”: “Metaphor for a missing moment/Pull me in to your perfect circle/One womb, one shame, one resolve/Liberate this will to release us all.”

Though several songs were initially played with Alexander, the recording sessions continued to evolve with the introduction of drummer Josh Freese, who Howerdel knew from working together on GN’R’s Chinese Democracy. Howerdel says Freese has “a very angular way of playing” that was ideal for APC’s music. (Alexander still appears on Mer De Noms’ opening track, “The Hollow.”)

Former Failure guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen was recruited into the band, and promptly recorded solos for “Thinking of You” and “Sleeping Beauty.” Bassist Paz Lenchantin — initially recommended to Howerdel by TOOL’s Adam Jones — also joined up to record bass on one track, add violin to three songs, and deliver backing vocals throughout.

For many fans across the globe, director David Fincher’s music video for “Judith” offered their first thrilling glimpse of the new band in action. It was a simple performance piece, but its agitated texture seemed torn from life, with jittery edits and heavily scratched film.

Full of shadows and muted colors, the footage looked more like a crime scene than a rock video. Freese pounds the drums under a short blond mohawk. Keenan’s wearing a wig and black leather, and Van Leeuwen is mostly in silhouette. Fans still swoon online about the perfectly timed moment when Lenchantin ties her hair up during a mid-song breakdown. In a 2023 birthday post to Lenchantin, even Freese described it as “one of the finest moments during one of APC’s finest moments.”

Those lucky enough to have witnessed a live APC show early on already knew that this band was something special. In October 1999, A Perfect Circle were the first act to play the main stage at the inaugural Coachella Music and Arts Festival, the same weekend TOOL were among the headliners. The California desert heat was overwhelming as they hit the stage. “You’re early,” Keenan told the crowd.

As the set unfolded, Lenchantin felt faint, and Freese’s kick-drum pedal began to break down. Just as the band finished a psychedelic mash-up of Ozzy Osbourne and the Cure, their bass amp blew up. “Technical… difficulties,” Keenan announced as their crew grappled with the problem. “There you go: No bass, no song. Thank you for coming.”

“It was so hot that it fried out the bass amp — just smoke everywhere,” Keenan recalls. The mercury peaked as high as 120 degrees that weekend. The next night, TOOL and Rage Against the Machine closed the festival on the same stage to a crowd going berserk, bringing down the metal crowd barrier upfront.

Out on the road, that first official lineup of APC got to know one another. Early one morning, Freese discovered that Keenan was unlike most rock & roll frontmen he had known.

“Shortly after going on tour, I remember one morning waking up on the tour bus and Maynard was up at like seven in the morning, cleaning the coffee machine out and tidying up the front lounge of the bus,” recalls Freese, who was witnessing a bit of Keenan’s Army training and discipline in action. “I’m thinking, God, most lead singers I’ve been on tour with are just now going to bed, and they’re definitely not trying to make the beds on the tour bus or whatever the hell he was doing.”

There was no smoking on the bus, but they bonded watching comedies like Dumb and Dumber, and by seeking out the best food and drink they could find on the road while opening for Nine Inch Nails.

“I think comedy was something that kept us all afloat,” says Van Leeuwen, who took some inspiration from seeing APC’s already hugely successful frontman in action. “For me to watch him sort of take a couple steps down to start a new project said a lot, because it’s not easy to start new projects — especially something that obviously got pigeonholed as a side project for him.”

However, that first lineup would not hold together. Keenan returned to work with TOOL on what would become 2001’s Lateralus and had no idea how long he would be grappling with that project and subsequent tour. It was unknown when A Perfect Circle would work again.

While Keenan was away with TOOL, though, Howerdel kept working on new music. He gathered Lenchantin, Freese and Van Leeuwen for a day of jamming at SIR Studios in Hollywood. Howerdel came in with a riff heavily inspired by Rob Zombie’s 1998 debut solo album, Hellbilly Deluxe, and nothing else. Together, the band built the foundation of a song that would be called “Gravity,” which was later chosen as the closing track on their second album, 2003’s Thirteenth Step.

“Then Paz wrote that bass line, Troy wrote those beautiful chords on top, and Josh’s drums… everyone just made their own part,” says Howerdel. “And I thought, God, we now know the musical vocabulary from playing together long enough. Now we’re actually collaborating as a unit. I was really excited.”

And then Lenchantin announced she was leaving.

“It was such a high, and then it just sort of fell apart,” Howerdel continues. “She kind of musically broke up with me that day. I think she wanted to contribute more in the writing, which maybe I was holding close to my chest still. But in that moment, to me it was like, that [kind of band collaboration] was really going to happen.”

Lenchantin escaped to Zwan, the post-Smashing Pumpkins band led by Billy Corgan. Then Van Leeuwen was offered a dream gig touring with Queens of the Stone Age — and as Josh Homme & Co.’s 2002 album, Songs for the Deaf, became a hit around the world, the guitarist started feeling more like a member of that band. With lineup vacancies and the future of APC in limbo as Keenan focused on TOOL, Van Leeuwen was torn about what to do.

“It was a real hard decision to make for me personally, because I felt the same way about it that Billy did,” says Van Leeuwen, agreeing that APC had coalesced into a real band. But with Lenchantin gone, something had already shifted. “When you have Paz there, that feminine energy changes everything to me — in a way that you can’t replicate.”

Keenan understood his concerns and encouraged Van Leeuwen to move on. “It kind of fell apart after the first album. I had to get back and do TOOL and had no idea what was going to happen,” Keenan says of the Mer De Noms lineup. “And I’m like, ‘Dude, I would be a complete asshole if I made you hang around waiting and wondering if there was gonna be another Perfect Circle album.”

Although having the band dismantled before completing their second album was disappointing, Howerdel steadily worked on new tracks for what would become Thirteenth Step. He set up a studio in a house in Beachwood Canyon, beneath the Hollywood sign, while Keenan found his own place in the same area.

It soon became clear that things would operate differently this time around. Instead of leaving Howerdel to create the music alone and adding vocals after the instrumentals were finished, Keenan began weighing in on the songs during their development. The guitarist estimates that about 70 percent of the music was already underway when Keenan returned from TOOL’s Lateralus tour. And to Howerdel’s surprise, the singer rejected two songs.

“They were heavier,” Howerdel says of the discarded tracks, suggesting they could be interpreted as sounding a little too close to TOOL. Keenan actively worked to keep the two bands separate in sound and mission. “I definitely was disappointed that he didn’t hear what I was hearing,” says Howerdel. “But then again, he’s got to hear something. It’s a lesson that I started learning.”

The theme that Keenan explored on the album focused on the costs and tragedies of addiction. The singer drew from the experiences he witnessed around him in the music world.

“If your friend group is wide enough,” Keenan says of the stories told on Thirteenth Step, “you’re going to have people that will inspire a lot with their pain, resilience, recovery, the depths of hell they happen to be in — whether it’s addiction or whether it’s just relational. There’s a lot of biography around to tap into.”

One track that emerged was “Weak and Powerless,” the album’s first single. On it, Keenan sings a cautionary tale over a driving, percussive soundtrack: “Someone feed the monkey while I/Dig in search of China/White as Dracula as I approach the bottom.”

“It was potent, and I didn’t realize how potent it would be until people told me how much it meant to them,” says the guitarist. “It’s Maynard’s words. I’m just the undercurrent.”

“Pet” swirled with madness while “The Outsider” also landed as a rare heavy track on the album despite Howerdel composing the music on acoustic guitar during a vacation in Hawaii, with “beautiful windows open at night.”

The album closes with “Gravity,” and a final plea shouted by Keenan: “I choose to live!”

“When you’ve met people that chose not to, sometimes you just have to say it out loud,” Keenan says now of the message.

Jeordie White (a.k.a. Twiggy Ramirez, formerly with Marilyn Manson) took over the bass on Thirteenth Step, and Danny Lohner added second guitar. Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha joined up on the subsequent tour. (Iha remained until 2017, when he returned to the Pumpkins.)

A Perfect Circle’s third album, 2004’s eMOTIVe, arrived almost immediately after the Thirteenth Step tour ended. Keenan had space in his schedule — plus he was inspired by a time of U.S. war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the looming presidential election. His idea was to react to the troubled times with a selection of cover songs chosen for their lasting relevance. eMOTIVe was released on November 2nd, the same day as the election, and would be the last thing anyone heard from A Perfect Circle for many years.

Distinguishing the album from a simple collection of covers was the original music that APC created underneath classic lyrics. (In that, eMOTIVe was not unlike Rage Against the Machine’s final studio album, 2000’s Renegades.) Some motifs were sketched out during soundchecks on the band’s prior Thirteenth Step tour, with Howerdel improvising new bits of music as Keenan sang the lyrics from Depeche Mode’s “People Are People” and the ancient blues lament “When the Levee Breaks,” famously covered in 1971 by Led Zeppelin.

The eMOTIVe album sessions progressed with interpretations of songs by John Lennon (“Imagine”), Crucifix (“Annihilation”), Marvin Gaye (“What’s Going On”), Black Flag (“Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie”) and a haunting a cappella reading of Joni Mitchell (“Fiddle and the Drum”). Keenan’s vocals were layered and otherworldly, the music mostly unrecognizable from the originals.

“At the time I really thought it was a weird move,” says Freese of the covers project. “I remember kind of like rolling my eyes about the whole thing going, ‘God, are we really making an album of covers? How lame.’ I just thought it was kind of a cop-out.” His opinion of eMOTIVe has changed dramatically in the years since. “That record’s really cool,” he says now.

Encouraged by Keenan, Howerdel took lead vocals on four songs. “He has a solid singing voice and people just needed to hear him,” says Keenan, “especially because I knew once this one was out, there was going to be a long break before another one. So he should probably pursue a career and people should get used to hearing what he sounds like.”

The album also included two original songs: the Howerdel/Keenan composition “Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums” and the raging “Passive,” the latter from an unrealized Nine Inch Nails side-project called Tapeworm that featured Trent Reznor, Keenan, Lohner and others.

Keenan had been performing “Passive” live with A Perfect Circle as far back as 2000, and on eMOTIVe he delivers a vocal as searing as anything from throughout his career. At the song’s close, Keenan roars: “Go ahead and play dead /I know that you can hear this … Why can’t you turn and face me?/You fucking disappoint me!”

The band didn’t tour behind the album — and it would be years of limbo before the dormant A Perfect Circle was active again. Not even Keenan knew when they would come back together, if ever. Years of silence began to pile up.

“I just had to fight the fight to get the next TOOL record done, so I had to focus my energy on getting that done,” he says. “Plus, that was when I was just starting to make wine, so that was going to take a lot of my time.”

Keenan’s Puscifer project was also growing into something significant, and they released their debut album, V Is for Vagina, in 2007. “Maynard even said, ‘We both want to do like a solo thing. Let’s go do that and come back together and be stronger for it,’” Howerdel recalls. “That was the idea. I think it went way longer than we thought.”

Howerdel nevertheless continued working on new material. He created soundtrack music for the 2005 video game Jak X: Combat Racing, recruiting Freese, Lenchantin and Van Leeuwen for the sessions. At the same time, he worked on his first solo project, Ashes Divide — whose 2008 debut album, Keep Telling Myself It’s Alright, was co-produced with Lohner.

A Perfect Circle’s dormancy came to an end late one night in June 2010, when the guitarist received a call for help from Keenan. The singer explained that in just two days he was scheduled to perform “Bohemian Rhapsody” with Queen’s Brian May, but the guitarist had suddenly become unavailable. He then asked if Howerdel could step in. The APC guitarist had never played the 1975 classic-rock epic in his life, but he agreed.

It was to be a one-song performance at an all-star concert hosted by Activision at L.A.’s Staples Center, coinciding with the annual E3 video game convention. Backstage at the show, APC’s reunited duo were seated near Pharrell, who was wearing Gucci shades and bent over a laptop with headphones plugged in. Jane’s Addiction were in an adjacent room and set to perform one of their few shows with Duff McKagan of GN’R on bass. Eminem closed the night, joined onstage by blink-182 drummer Travis Barker.

Keenan had been circling “Bohemian Rhapsody” for a while. “Nobody’s written music like that since they wrote it. It’s a fantastic song,” Maynard said as his set time approached. With a grin, he noted, “It’s out of my vocal range.”

“It’s out of my guitar ability,” added Howerdel, who, again, was recruited less than 48 hours before.

Onstage, the guitarist plugged into a Vox AC30 amp just like the one used by Brian May and borrowed a Les Paul from Lohner. Howerdel and Keenan were joined by the strings and woodwinds of the L.A. Philharmonic for the performance, and together they delivered a rousing rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

“I was terrified that night. I’ve never been more nervous before a show than that,” an amused Howerdel says now, looking back. He also notes, “That probably brought us back together as a band. Maynard was on to other things. And just being in the same room helped reinvigorate the band.”

That fall, A Perfect Circle officially ended their six-year hiatus with a five-city tour, devoting each night to performing one of their albums in full. Both band leaders caught the flu but soldiered on. “That was difficult. I don’t recommend that,” Keenan remembers, admitting the idea of performing a different album every night was his. “I’m pretty dumb sometimes.”

In 2011, APC toured again, this time only playing songs from eMOTIVe. They continued as an occasional live act. Then an unexpected fissure happened in late 2012, when Freese, who’d been with the band since their debut album, abruptly quit and tweeted without explanation: “After 13 years, I’ve decided to leave @aperfectcircle with no plans of returning.”

A 2013 greatest hits collection, Three Sixty, contained one new song, “By and Down,” a track heavily layered with echoes of the Cure and led by an alternately pained and soaring vocal performance from Keenan.

In 2016, Keenan and Howerdel started talking about what would become their fourth album, Eat the Elephant. By then, Howerdel was playing guitar a lot less and focused more on piano. And once again, the long struggle to complete a TOOL album left a wide-open space that A Perfect Circle could operate within. (The struggle to complete TOOL’s Fear Inoculum would ultimately take 13 years.) By then, Keenan had also evolved Puscifer into a significant entity with its own mission and audience.

To record Eat the Elephant, which was released in 2018, the band needed to adopt different ways of working than they had in the past, now that Keenan preferred to record his vocals at home in Jerome. It was also the first APC album that Howerdel did not engineer and produce. The duo handed that off to Dave Sardy, known for his work with Oasis, ZZ Top, Slayer and Hank Williams III.

“I don’t know that we would do that again,” Keenan says. “It caused a little bit of issues. Dave Sardy is a great mixer, great producer. I just think that dynamic… I’m not used to it, and Billy wasn’t used to it. We got some cool things out of it, but I don’t think we would put ourselves through that again. There’s already two strong wills involved. To add a third strong will just ends up being more stress, more arguments.”

Regardless, the album was a powerful return to form, colliding melodic beauty and darkness with firepower and finesse. Their longest album at just under one hour, Eat the Elephant opened with the hopeful title song, its lyrics about pushing forward through a monumental challenge: “This massive endeavor/Ominous and daunting.” On “Disillusioned,” Keenan offered a message gentle and alarming, calling on humanity to reject the “dopamine” of life eternally plugged-in and online: “Time to put the silicon obsession down/Take a look around/Find a way in the silence.”

The band also adopted some creative ways to make the finished product come alive. For Eat the Elephant’s deluxe box set, they commissioned an abstract, 58-minute, 360-degree holographic video set to the album’s music. The film featured Keenan, Howerdel and host of writhing “octoheart” creatures and other creepy crawlers — and when watched on a phone through the set’s included two-inch-tall pyramid viewer, it became the “world’s first hologram album.”

A Perfect Circle have released four studio albums in their first 25 years, only one less than TOOL, and are likely to have another one out before the latter reemerges with new music.

Some of the competing parts of Keenan’s musical life came together in 2024 on his Sessanta tour, which celebrated his 60th birthday through nightly collaborative performances between APC, Puscifer and, as the bill’s wildcard, Primus. Freese was back behind the drumkit for A Perfect Circle for the first time in 13 years (though he missed some dates due to his other commitments as the drummer of Foo Fighters). Freese says of reconnecting with the singer: “We just fell back into it and were like, Yeah, let’s just not talk about that stupid thing that happened back in 2012 and let’s just be friends again. He’s like a brother to me.”

The tour landed at the Hollywood Bowl on April 20th, 2024, a few days after Keenan’s actual birthday. There was also a surprise guest: TOOL, who were there to perform one song, the epic “Ænima.”

At the Bowl, APC were also joined by Paz Lenchantin and Troy Van Leeuwen, reuniting the original lineup for the first time since 2001, to rip through “Judith.” James Iha and Tim Alexander were there, too, for “The Hollow.” With all the comings and goings onstage, some of these meaningful reconnections between key players from the band’s history were inevitably missed by fans watching at the Bowl — but their presence was felt by Keenan and Howerdel.

Before the “Ænima” performance, for example, Howerdel and Adam Jones reenacted a moment from their shared history as a private joke: Howerdel handed Jones a guitar, as he once did every night as TOOL’s roadie.

To accompany the tour, Keenan created a three-song EP, with each of the bands finishing a track begun by the singer. The Sessanta E.P.P.P. opened with APC’s melancholy song “Kindred,” an elegant mingling of piano and crushing guitar strokes.

“He says, ‘Can you please work on one of these?’ I didn’t know exactly what he had in mind, and I don’t know if he did when he was sending these songs out,” says Howerdel. The songs were “scratches on a napkin” for each band to complete. Keenan and the bands had such a blast between the recordings and the tour that they’ve extended the Puscifer, APC and Primus party into 2025 with the Sessanta V2.0 spring run.

TOOL’s next recording project, meanwhile, is not exactly on the fast track, and their slow pace leaves room for possibilities in Keenan’s schedule. Howerdel released What Normal Was, his first solo album under his own name, in 2022, but is currently working on new tracks he hopes will be the foundation of a new APC album.

The creative process is intense as always. “As I’m writing, sometimes I find myself [thinking], Wow, I really like this, but man, this is fucking sinister,” he says. “I’m in a not-sleeping-much and self-discovery mode. When I’m writing music, I’ve been full night-terror, waking up — like, can’t let your mind rest thing.” He laughs.

Keenan is prepared to create with any one of his projects. “I’m always writing. I’m writing with everyone,” he says, referring not only to Howerdel but Puscifer’s Mat Mitchell and Carina Round. He also refers obliquely to TOOL in the wings: “And if I can get the other guys to dig in, there’s always that.

“I’m sure that Billy’s got a folder of fun stuff for me to dig through,” he adds. “It’s all about timing.”