By all accounts, Tool bassist Justin Chancellor has racked up his share of acclaim over the years. In fact, he was presented with the lifetime achievement award this past January at the Bass Magazine Awards. Still, while a decorated player in his own right, it’s his rhythm section counterpart in Tool, drummer Danny Carey, that tends to soak up the spotlight when it comes to technical prowess and unworldly ability.
As it turns out, that acclaim doesn’t just get lavished on Carey from outside the Tool camp, as Chancellor himself is sure that Carey will go down in history as one of the all-time greats. While Chancellor is no doubt a bit biased, Carey‘s resume certainly speaks for itself.
In a piece newly published over at Guitar World Chancellor practically sang the praises of his now long-time bandmate in the aforementioned multi-platinum band. Chancellor‘s kudos also extended to Tool‘s vocalist Maynard James Keenan in that chat, with Chancellor stating:
“There’s a vulnerability to our music that attracts people. Maynard is up there with the greatest vocalists, I think Danny will go down as one of the best rock drummers of all time, and Adam and I have our own styles. We’re not the greatest, but we try really hard, and there’s an honesty that comes through. People can hear that and relate to it on a deeper level.”
As Chancellor sees it, being in the band with two relative masters of their craft serves as great motivation for him to continue to push and improve himself. He explained:
“I still feel like I’m trying hard to be in a good band, I really do. And I think that’s a healthy approach. If you start to believe the hype about yourself, then you start to lose the bigger picture, and your focus is in the wrong place. You get to enjoy that kind of gratitude when you play your live show, so you don’t need to spend the rest of your time thinking about it.”
The topic of that conversation also veered into the Tool‘s much discussed creative process. Perfectionism is often an understatement when it comes to the laborious pace taken for the band to create new material — a fact evidenced by the growing gap that continues to balloon between their sonic output.
On average, it seems fans can expect at least a 5 year wait in between albums from the band. However, in the case of 2019’s chart-topping “Fear Inoculum“, a roughly 13-year gap was weathered. While Chancellor has remained a proponent for the band becoming more efficient, even he has become a bit more beholden to the band’s limitations in recent months, admitting earlier this year that when it comes to Tool, “art doesn’t really have a schedule.”
The band’s former bassist Paul D’Amour has previously lamented the exhaustive songwriting process of his ex-bandmates. Even the ever-prolific Keenan has expressed his hopes of an expedited approach to the band’s new material, though he certainly has no shortage of other projects and tasks to keep him busy should it not materialize.
In this above-mentioned newly shared piece with Chancellor, he explained at least how his bass parts come about in that process, offering:
“A lot of times a riff will come to me when I’m walking my dogs or driving around, and when I go to count it out it’s usually in an odd meter, but you can make anything straight time when you put four beats behind it. That’s something we take full advantage of in our music. And we’ll even overlap time signatures, or take an odd meter and straighten it out within a riff.
“But then again, I have the advantage of Danny being our drummer, so I can play anything and he latches right on and makes it better. I can bring him something in 7 and he’ll be right on it. Even if something sounds a little uncomfortable, Danny finds a way to groove through it and make it come alive.”
Expanding a bit on how the rest of his bandmates get involved before bringing in Keenan to add the finishing touches, Chancellor went on to say:
“We have a whole treasure chest of ideas on our phones that we record on our own. Basically, Adam and I have riffs and Danny has rhythms or different time-signature beats, and we try to keep them basic before bringing them in to see what the other members will do with them.
My role is to marry things together – that’s the duty of bass guitar in general, as the glue in the lower register. It’s something you feel that merges the kick and the guitar strings and the voice. It has melody, but it’s deep down there so it can support everything. We establish a riff so we and the listener can identify it, and then we say, ‘Okay, now how far away from it can we go on this journey?’”
