Maynard James Keenan has suggested that the worst may be yet to come, amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Speaking with Zane Lowe and Apple Music, the Tool, Puscifer and A Perfect Circle frontman was asked if he was “hopeful” about the future.
“Short answer: Yes,” responded Keenan, before adding the caveat that there will be plenty more trials, tribulations and “growing pains” before humanity gets through the worst of the COVID-19 situation.
He then appeared to refer to the high rate of coronavirus deaths in the US. “I feel like we’re going to go through a lot of changes; we’re going to go through a lot of growing pains – and not all of us are going to make it through those growing pains,” he said.
“That’s the hardest part, as a human being to really grasp: that you might not be a part of what happens over the crest in that new valley.
“You just might not be there because you didn’t pay attention to the basics. You didn’t listen to the wind, you didn’t smell the air… simple things.”
Keenan was chatting with Lowe about the latest music he has released, most recently a new Puscifer single ‘Apocalypical’. He has also dropped new albums through A Perfect Circle and Tool, and he wanted to put to bed any rumours that his lyrics predicted the situation the world finds itself in.
“People have, I guess, complimented or acknowledge, or they claim, that there’s a lot of prophetic things that came out on Eat the Elephant, prophetic things on Inoculum, probably prophetic things on [the new Puscifer album].”
It’s not “prophetic,” Keenan explained, but rather his keen “understanding patterns and understanding human nature and where we’re going.
“Although they might seem specific, they’re not. They’re human experience.”
