A Perfect Circle: One bite at a time

He was a strange fish, this rock star.

He sounded tense and anxious, tired and bored. He sighed a lot, and spoke in little pressurised spurts of words that sometimes made little sense.

He didn't laugh very often, so when he did, it was like dark clouds parting to reveal the sun.

But behind all that, Maynard James Keenan had the unshakeable self-confidence of someone who's used to being treated like the most important person in the room.

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"If I had to give you a broad stroke on the new A Perfect Circle album, I'd say it's about accountability," he said.

Mostly based at his winery in Arizona, Keenan was in L.A. doing press, spreading the word about Eat The Elephant, the first A Perfect Circle record in 14 years.

"We're going through strange times, but it's only going to get worse. And that's all down to human nature, really. It's just the nature of humans to consume themselves."

He paused, sighed, continued on.

"It's all about power, and I don't think there's a cure. You can only deal with the tip of the iceberg and ignore the larger problem beneath, because it's just part of our DNA. The things we do to each other are just a symptom of our species, and it goes in cycles."

So far, so bleak. But maybe music could offer a little comfort.

"All you can do is sing a song about it and help inspire somebody to be a bit more kind to those around them. Human nature's always gonna be there, and we're always gonna do f…ed-up things to one another. Hopefully you can just have a few moments under the rainbow with someone along with way."

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. This much-delayed album loomed over Keenan and his bandmates for so long, they decided finally to make a start last year, so they bit into it and started chewing.

Twelve months later, Eat The Elephant is upon us and the publicity machine is cranking into gear, but really, A Perfect Circle is just one of many side projects for Keenan.

Most people are interested in this guy because of his main band, Tool, an ostentatiously gloomy hard-rock act formed in Los Angeles in 1990.

Full disclosure: I never "got" Tool.

With open mind and expectantly flapping ears, I listened to all four Tool albums, records others assured me were among the greatest ever made.

But it just sounded like punishing, overblown doom-rock to me.

The rhythm section pounded and lurched like a drunk climbing uneven stairs in leaden gumboots.

The guitars ground away, searching for the dreariest possible chord progressions, while Keenan wailed and moaned like some sad and angry ghost.

Underneath all the tricky time signatures and pompous prog-metal posturing, the songs all sounded like funeral dirges for the terminally depressed.

Even so, the world is densely populated with rabid Tool fans for whom Keenan is only a beard and a toga short of being a God.

Few bands inspire such devotion. Keenan's every interview, lyric and online pronouncement is endlessly dissected by disciples, as if they're dealing with holy scriptures.

"Yeah, well, there will always be a percentage of our fanbase who need to stay on their meds," says Keenan, drily.

"That sort of intensity can be enjoyable for a while, until it crosses a line and you have to get your taser out."

He gives a little chuckle, and I wonder if I've misjudged this guy. He seems to have a sense of humour after all.

Even so, just like Tool, A Perfect Circle remain untroubled by accusations of cheerfulness.

These men are not chipper, they do not smile in publicity shots, they wear a lot of inky-black clothes, though to his credit, Keenan likes to accessorise with a variety of mad wigs glued to his shaven head.

There's no denying that this is a band with a heavy history. A Perfect Circle is one of those conglomerations of long-serving noiseniks routinely labelled a "supergroup".

You have Keenan up front, of course, sporadic lord chancellor of Tool and also leader of his own "improvisational hardcore band", Puscifer.

At his side is co-leader Billy Howerdel, formerly guitarist with Nine Inch Nails and Ashes Divide and guitar tech for Tool, Faith No More, Guns N' Roses and David Bowie.

That graceful Japanese-American gentleman with the long, glossy hair? That's James Iha, ex-Smashing Pumpkins.

Drummer Jeff Friedl is also in Puscifer and Ashes Divide.

And bassist Matt McJunkins did time as touring bassist for Eagles of Death Metal, appearing on stage with them at the Bataclan Theatre during the Paris terrorist attack in 2015, in which 89 audience members were killed.

A Perfect Circle formed in the late 90s after Howerdel moved into Keenan's North Hollywood rental, a ramshackle 1920s cottage with squirrels and possums living in the attic.

They communicate pretty well to this day, reckons Keenan, after those early years of sharing a house.

"He knows I'm not very good at doing dishes, though. I mean, I'll scrub the toilet, no problem. I'll clean the bathroom from head to toe, but I got some sort of hang-up on dishes."

A Perfect Circle's debut album Mer De Noms was released in 2000, with a slightly different line-up that included former and future members of Zwan, Queens of the Stone Age, Pixies and Marilyn Manson's backing band. Did I mention "supergroup"?

Assorted line-up tweaks took place with Thirteenth Step (2003) and eMOTIVe (2004), and A Perfect Circle went into an extended hiatus soon after, broken by the occasional short live tour. And then, well… here we are, 14 years later.

"Let's just say we lost track of time," says Keenan, though he was busy with Tool and Puscifer albums and tours during this period, and running his beloved vineyard.

"But once we made a start, these new songs came together fairly quickly, once we weeded out some excess. When you're a guitar player like Billy, sitting in the studio waiting for your singer to come back, there's a tendency to keep endlessly adding things in. Suddenly, your soup becomes a Borscht. I'm the dick who then comes back and says, no - pull some spices out, pull those potatoes out, let's just taste the stock on its own and see what we're working with. To me, space is really important. I need some space in the song so I can hear where the vocal melody's gonna go."

Certainly, Eat The Elephant is a more sparse and subtle proposition than much of Keenan's previous work. When he's not screaming his lyrics over Tool's brutal, sludgy riffs, Keenan gets to experiment more with harmonies, tone, texture.

Some of the new songs find this former Ohio choirboy almost crooning, his voice warm and soft over plangent pianos and shimmering waves of electric guitar.

One such song is Disillusioned, in which Keenan ponders the sense of entitlement he perceives in many of today's teenagers.

The video shows a squadron of young people standing in formation, engrossed in their cellphones. In another shot, robed youths sit in a circle in a darkened room, clustered around a laptop on an altar while electrical cables slither over everything like snakes.

"Time to put the silicone obsession down," sings Keenan, like some grumpy grandad railing against the evils of texting and the pesky interwebs. "Take a look around…".

The song was partly inspired by his loathing for internet review site, Yelp.

"That thing is f…ing poison! Sites like Yelp have fostered this generation of novice experts who have the power to open their mouths but haven't actually put the work into knowing what they're talking about. I've had bad Yelp reviews of my tasting room, but it had nothing to do with the wine. The reviews were bad merely because I wasn't there! That's like giving my record a bad review because I wasn't in the record store when they bought it! I can only say to those people: shut the f… up!"

You want to say to him, come on Maynard, lighten up. But I suspect he wouldn't take this well.

It seems to be something of a heavy responsibility being Maynard James Keenan. When people take what you do so seriously, it puts a lot of weight on one man's shoulders.

"I've always wanted to come from the direction of teaching a man to fish rather than handing him a fish," he says when asked about the earnestness of his fan-base.

"When my fans start over-analysing and disappearing down a rabbit-hole, I feel like I've failed, because I haven't taught that person to fish. I'd rather my songs were some sort of jumping-off point for other activities in their world that help them ground themselves and celebrate taking a breath."

Now 53, Keenan was born into a devout southern Baptist family in Ohio, an only child whose parents divorced when he was four. He joined the army as a young man, then left to go to art school and began a career in music in his early 20s.

These days, when he's not on-stage, Keenan is fairly reclusive. He doesn't give many interviews, and prefers to carefully manage his public image by posting his own short films and "motivational speeches" online.

The curious should check out an ongoing YouTube series entitled The Art of Work.

There's Maynard, high in the parched hills of Northern Arizona, fondling fat bunches of grapes, hooning around on a fork-lift while wearing a ten gallon hat, swirling Pinot in his glass.

There's Maynard in the dojo, doing Brazilian martial arts, throwing some geezer over his shoulder onto the mat.

He looks so peaceful striding between grapevines, unlike the somewhat sour character on the phone today.

Keenan seems to be in his happy place when he's on the farm, with his wife Lei Li at his side and a bunch of ducks running around in the orchard.

"You learn so much from the farming and winemaking, and also the jiu jitsu," he tells me when I ask about his life outside music.

"With jiu jitsu, there's another force, and you have to understand how to react to it, and there's always going to be someone who's better than you. It teaches you humility. You have to react fast to the situation to avoid it being too humiliating."

With wine, he reckons it's "more of a long-term humiliation."

"Whatever decisions you made last year, you're not gonna know how poor they were for another two years. So both jiu jitsu and winemaking teach you about cause and effect. They both say to you: you made that choice, now here are the repercussions."

Music has similarities, but also, some key differences.

"With music, if it doesn't work out, you can always claim you wanted it to be that way. If people say your band sucks, you can say- yeah, but we wanted to sound like this. Or you can just blame your bandmates for any faults."

I suspect he's joking, but who knows? What is clear, however, is that all three of Keenan's bands have carved out their own distinct niche, and their own fan-base.

"Yeah, there are people who like all three, but the percentage of insanity in those people is far lower than people who just love Tool. The people who think more outside the box tend to be Puscifer fans, because there's a real blend of comedy and tragedy there. That band has a sort of feminine, motherly energy, whereas Tool is more masculine and cerebral. A Perfect Circle is somewhere in the middle."

It's a constant juggling act keeping his various ventures on track. Keenan has deadlines for everything punched into his phone and will rapidly switch course if one of projects is behind where he thinks it needs to be.

The window to complete this A Perfect Circle record largely came about because of Keenan's frustration over endlessly delays finishing the next Tool album, but now it's done, and he'll be touring Eat The Elephant hard-out over the coming months.

"It'll be a year of touring, on and off, because the grape harvest starts mid-July, so then I'm home. That thing of touring relentlessly for three years at a stretch is something you do when you're 22 and trying to break your band. You don't have to do that when you're 53. It's not wise or healthy."

Not that Keenan likes things to be too easy. The key to interesting art, he says, is to embrace friction, rather than try to avoid it.

"You know, some of the best wines are made in places where it's almost a train wreck. Places where you're constantly on the edge of failure. Those vines don't wanna be where they are, so you have to have a lot of skill, and luck, to make things work. Same with music. Friction is important. A lot of the best music is made when there's a very real threat of disaster. You could fail every time, and that spurs you on."

• A Perfect Circle's Eat The Elephant was released this week