Update – July 15th 3:30pm:
More details on the suit Tool are defending themselves against can be found here.
Original Story:
Tool‘s long wait between albums has been revealed to be the result of a multi-level lawsuit made against the group. The lawsuit stems from an unnamed friend of band guitarist Adam Jones having filed suit against the band back in 2007 claiming that he had created artwork for them and did not receive proper credit. Tool were then sued by an insurance company they had hired to protect themselves over such contingencies due to certain technicalities with the case. The band themselves decided to countersue against the insurer and all these years later will now finally see the case go to trial this coming January.
Drummer Danny Carey told here:
“The whole thing is really depressing. The bad thing is it’s really time consuming. As we’ve gotten older and our priorities have changed, it’s hard to get the band on a good, solid schedule as it is. People have kids now. And there’s lots of other things that pop up. To throw this into the mix, it makes everything that much worse and stresses people out.”
Jones himself added:
“And it’s costing millions and millions and millions of dollars to defend us. And the fans are all going, ‘We want a new Tool album. What the fuck?’ And you don’t want to pull people into your problems, because they don’t understand.
But the point is, we’re fighting the good fight. We’re going to trial and we want to crush them. But every time we’ve gotten close to going to trial, it gets postponed and we’ve wasted money and time and it has just drained our creative energy. We bought an insurance policy for peace of mind, but instead we would have been better off if we never had it and just dealt with the original lawsuit.”
On the writing front the group have numerous song ideas in the works, but thus far only one song writtern they’d describe as done. Jones said of that:
“Sometimes I feel we get a little too proggy or too into exploring time signatures but not getting heavy enough for my taste. There are some good nose-bleeding riffs happening, and I’m really happy about that. It’s not out-of-the-gate crazy heavy, but there are these little journeys with nice paths that end up very heavy.”
Jones later added:
“The brush strokes and the struggling and the suffering that the painter went through… I find it so hard to be creative when you have something awful nagging at you, just stuck between the hemispheres of your brain and affecting your sleep and your relationship with other band members. We have such a strong creative freedom in this band. It’s like we’ve been in a war. And it’s unnecessary. It’s just a shame.”
Carey remains hopeful the group will have something done by the end of the year however:
“I’m hoping that we have something really solid recorded by the end of the year. But we’ll see how it goes. I thought that last year, too. But we’re making great progress. We’ve really knocked out a lot of good things, especially over the last month. We’re all excited about it.”
Jones himself said of that:
“It’s not good when it’s done, it’s done when it’s good. We’ve been working at our own pace, but we don’t want to put out something and go, ‘This song’s fine, just put it out.’ I’m never gonna put something out where later, I go, ‘Fuck, I wish we hadn’t done that.’ We’re just not going to settle for doing anything but our best work, and the fans appreciate that.”
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