Maynard James Keenan From TOOL Battles COVID-19 Again
TOOL frontman Maynard James Keenan was guested on George Stroumboulopoulos’ Apple Music Hits show yesterday, 3rd of February.
The 56-year-old rocker talked about his experience with the ongoing pandemic on the program and also discussed the themes of his new music on Apple Music Hits.
Keenan has told AZ Central previously that he infected coronavirus in October 2020. It was his first round with the disease and it took very long for him to recover.
“I’m still dealing with the residual effects,” he explained back then, “But it was ugly. I survived it, but it wasn’t pretty. So I definitely had to deal with that.”
He had to go through major medications to recover from the residual effects of the deadly virus, although he was still coughing anyway cause his lungs had damaged very badly.
And yesterday, he revealed during his conversation on Strombo that he infected again like mid-November and had to go to the ER in December.
“Ugly, ugly. Couldn’t breathe. I could barely put two words together without going into a coughing fit that, you know? It ended up kind of also progressing into pneumonia. So, if I stayed in the hospital, they said, ‘Okay, we can keep you here, but you’re fighting 12 other people for a bed and a ventilator we don’t have, so what do you want to do?’ I’m like, ‘Well, I need to breathe and I need to sleep.’”
He expressed why he didn’t want to stay in the hospital and treated his symptoms at home.
“So, you’re just treating symptoms at that point. There’s nothing you can do other than treat the symptom, so for real cough medicine, not the crap over-the-counter and then like an inhaler, and some antibiotics to fight pneumonia and strap the f*** in.”
Maynard James Keenan also talked about Existential Reckoning
Maynard James Keenan discusses his band Puscifer’s most recent album Existential Reckoning. During their conversations, he also shared the background of his new music by opening up about his earlier life. He explained his new album’s extraterrestrial is actually about pretending to fit in somewhere even if you don’t have to.
“Well, I grew up in Ohio, eventually moved to Michigan, but in a very fundamentalist conservative in a box community.” says to start explaining
“And when you’re an outsider, in a way, you don’t necessarily align with those things. In some ways, you have to blend in and play along, but that idea of what moves people, scary wizards that are half zombie somehow or in charge of your life, and you have to be cool to them and to get into the bar that is heaven,” he continues.
“It was just a strange concept for me and I bought into it and I didn’t buy into it and I bought into it and didn’t buy into it. And I think in a way that unknown of extraterrestrial intervention or the coming of the aliens, that’s kind of the new religion because it’s still kind of mysterious and scary and inspiring and lovely and awful and all those things. And I think because that’s an unknown, it’s like a combination of the new religion meets Bigfoot.”
Besides Existential Reckoning, Keenan also touched on some existential topics, including the untimely deaths of many musicians, too.
“I think we almost need that new generation of — not responsible because that’s boring — you know, crazy rockstar people, but not rockstar in the way it used to be where it was just self-destructive and you don’t make it past the age of 29,” Keenan says. “Somebody that can be a voice of reason but also a loose cannon in a way.”
So, we hope that he gets well soon! You can hear the whole interview down here.