For many TOOL obsessives, digging into Maynard James Keenan’s broad body of poetry across the alt-metal band’s discography can reveal a “cavern of treasures.” Not so much for the singer, himself, though. In fact, he thinks some of his lyrics are pretty “stupid,” per a recent podcast talk with Jackass’ Steve-O.
The pair’s recent conversation through Steve-O’s Wild Ride! show found the iconic vocalist explaining that he’s often balanced the “serious play” of bands like TOOL, A Perfect Circle and Puscifer with moments of humor. Sometimes the joke lands, sometimes it doesn’t,
“There’s some old TOOL songs I don’t like playing them because I feel like I failed them,” he confessed. “They’re popular songs, but I feel like I was trying to make a joke and it was a dumb joke. I should have just moved on.”
In particular, he cites “4°” from debut album Undertow as a particularly “stupid song,” and his lyrics have since become the real butt of the joke, at least to him.
“I feel like the lyrics don’t hold up under scrutiny,” he said. “The way I wrote it… I was trying to fucking make a butt sex joke and it was dumb.
“The song’s beautiful, what those guys did musically is great and I think maybe the melody’s a good melody but the words are just dumb. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking.”
Notably, TOOL haven’t gone “all the way in” with “4°” in some time. Per setlist.fm, they haven’t pounded it out live since a fall 2002 performance at the Erie Civic Center in Erie, Pennsylvania. That said, the group’s most-performed song remains the tangentially related, thrill-seeking “Stinkfist.”
You can dig into Keenan and Steve-O’s talk via the player up above, with the butt talk starting around the 46:00 mark.