It seems Hatebreed, etc. vocalist Jamey Jasta has yet to be able to connect with the music of multi-platinum alternative metal stars Tool, despite numerous attempts at actively trying to. In a new interview with This Day In Metal, Jasta was asked about the secrets to his lengthy success amid his varied career, to which he essentially attributed it to perseverance and actively making an attempt to “block out the detractors and the noise and the naysayers.”
While explaining his position, he also made a mention of his own disinterest in Tool‘s long-anticipated 2019 comeback album “Fear Inoculum“:
“Whatever it is, if it’s writing a book, if it’s making a film, if it’s making a record or writing a poem or fucking making a recipe — I don’t care what it is — you’ve gotta block out the people that maybe don’t believe in you to do it and you’ve gotta find the ones that do and you’ve gotta keep them close and you’ve gotta make sure that you do right by them and that they appreciate what you do and vice versa. And then also, I think it’s gotta be authentic, it’s gotta be from the heart, ’cause the stuff that really resonate to people 10, 20, 30 years in is stuff that I knew in the moment was ‘it’. You just know when you know.
And sometimes you can bring that idea to someone else and they go, ‘Nah’, and they write your shit off. Or you can put your blood, sweat and tears into a record and some reviewer will listen to it once and go, ‘No, this sucks,’ just like I did with the last Tool record that sounded like spa music. And that’s gonna happen. But you’ve gotta roll with the punches and you’ve just gotta have faith that it will find the ears and the eyes that it needs to find.”
Later expanding on his own failed attempts to get into Tool, Jasta stated:
“I never got into Tool, but every year — every other year, maybe — I’ll go, ‘Hey, I’m gonna try to get into Tool,’ and then someone will recommend a song and then I’ll go listen to the song. And a lot of times I end up liking the song. I never really go back to it, but I will hear it and I can recognize the genius in it. The playing is incredible and the production is incredible and [Maynard James Keenan‘s] voice is incredible. I don’t have any desire to really like go back and listen to it again, but I can say, ‘Wow,’ in the moment, when I do go check it out.
It was not too long ago on my Patreon, I was saying, ‘Man, I tried to listen to some song off the last album, and it sounded like I was in a spa in Sedona, waiting to get a massage’ or something. It was atmospheric and mellow and ethereal… I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s like it was something really delicate, soft but calming. And I’m, like, I just wanna listen to [Oakland, California death metal band] Necrot and just fucking [singing] ‘Drill the skull’. I’m just a caveman at heart — I just wanna hear, ‘Drill The Skull.’ And so then I listen to Necrot and I’m thinking, ‘Man, Maynard probably hates this shit.'”
