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Artist News Legal
Tool album delayed by insurance company legal battle
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 17 July 2014
How close Tool are to releasing a follow-up to their 2006 album ‘10,000 Days’ has long been a topic of rumour and debate. Now the band’s guitarist Adam Jones and drummer Danny Carey have come clean and said that there are currently no songs complete for it. Though they do have a lot of work in progress, they told Rolling Stone this week, much of their time in recent years has been devoted to a spiralling series of lawsuits.
It apparently began with a dispute over the creation of some artwork in 2007, before an insurance company underwriting the band’s legal costs sued them over some technicalities relating to the case, to which the band launched a countersuit.
“The whole thing is really depressing”, said Carey. “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 added: “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”.
Despite all this, work has continued on new music where possible, they said. The band are now “through the toughest part of writing”, insists Carey, with ideas just needing to be refined into songs. And one or two songs are actually near completion, it seems.
Discussing how it’s all sounding, Jones explained: “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”.
So that sounds good. Read the full interview here.
