Maynard James Keenan is the star of the latest edition of Amoeba Records’ popular What’s In My Bag? series on YouTube, and alongside paying his respects to influential rock artists – Minor Threat, Sonic Youth, Swans, Devo – Tool’s frontman also shares his love for legendary folk-rock singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell.
“My aunt turned me on to Joni Mitchell,” Keenan says. “This is a person who… you kind of dismiss her back in the day as just being this cutesy folk singer with her acoustic guitar, pretty with a big smile, and she was far beyond that. She was writing her own music. All of it. All of those early albums. She was also engineering and producing her own music. So, start to finish, Joni Mitchell wrote her own songs, recorded her own songs, performed her own songs as a solo artist.”
Keenan goes on to call Mitchell a “huge influence”.
“She would tune her guitar to whatever mood she was in and write the song from that tuning,” he cobtinues. “So there’s a lot of songs, allegedly, she can’t remember how to play because she can’t remember the tuning.”
This is far from the first time that Keenan has talked up Mitchell as a key influence on his musical journey.
In Tool’s early years, the singer gave a shout out to Mitchell during an interview with VJ Kurt Loder. When asked about music he loved in his youth, Keenan responded, “Joni Mitchell. I think everything Joni Mitchell did for music was big. I was really influenced by her.”
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He also spoke about Mitchell in a much more recent interview with YouTube personality Rock Beato.
“The two albums that I can remember most going, these albums changed the way that I thought of music,” the singer says, “was Black Sabbath’s first album, and Joni Mitchell Blue. I’ve listened to a million things over the years, but those were the ones that I kinda cut my teeth on.”
Speaking about how his aunt helped him make sense of Mitchell, Keenan told another interviewer, “She was actually able to convey to me, here’s a person who’s a woman, who is writing her own songs, who is producing and mixing and releasing her own songs. And it’s a woman fighting this uphill struggle in arguably a man’s rock world. So that sunk in right away for me. Even as young as I was, that made sense, like, Oh, this is somebody who is going against the grain in a way.”
In 1995, Keenan actually got to interview Mitchell for Hypno magazine and the two musicians went deep on their songwriting.
“I genuinely like wide modern chords which depict more complicated emotional situations,” Mitchell tells Keenan at one point. “You can have pure major experiences, but since we’ve been standing under the shadow of the bomb, it seems to me we’re all emotionally complex. That to me is why these modern chords are the chords of our spirits. You’d almost have to be blessedly an idiot to be cruising along on a pure major chord from day to day to day.”
“I think we’re evolving at a rate that we need to move on to the more complicated structures anyway,” Keenan replies. “Simplistic stuff is a good starting point, but you need to hear those things. You really do. They’re like software upgrades for the psyche.”
Watch Keenan’s What’s In My Bag? episode below.
Maynard James Keenan’s “What’s In My Bag?” | Amoeba Music – YouTube
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In additional Maynard James Keenan news, the singer shares the inside story behind the making of the new Puscifer album Normal Isn’t in the new issue of Metal Hammer, and in the new issue of Classic Rock.
(Image credit: Future)