Q&A: Puscifer’s Maynard James Keenan

Puscifer (Photo by Travis Shinn)

Puscifer’s Existential Reckoning, released back in 2020, took a deep dive into society’s treacherous value of entertainment over information. That album, the art-rock trio’s fourth, now plays out locally as its namesake tour rolls into Bass Concert Hall on Wednesday.

Before hitting the road with the band for the first time since 2016, singer Maynard James Keenan, who holds a certain nostalgia for Austin from his Army days at Fort Hood, took a call from the Chronicle.

Austin Chronicle: So where am I reaching you today?

Maynard James Keenan: Arizona.

AC: And I understand that you’ve just got back from Europe?

MJK: Yes.

AC: What does the rest of your week look like before you head out on the road with Puscifer?

MJK: I gotta get to Vegas and do rehearsals. We’re gonna get going on rehearsals ASAP. I think the band’s already rehearsing. I was just recovering from the jetlag.

AC: What day do you leave for the first show?

MJK: For shows, on the 9th. In Vegas.

AC: How do you manage coming back from one tour overseas and then immediately preparing to go out on tour with a different band? How does your mindset shift in preparation for that?

MJK: If you hang out with your friends from school or college and then you go hang out with your family for, like, a Thanksgiving dinner, you change. The room changes you, right? Different conversations, different people. So just be present in where you are with those people.

AC: How did you and Puscifer make the decision to start touring again in light of COVID-19 numbers ramping back up?

MJK: It’s been six years since Puscifer’s toured. Six years. We’re going out. I’ve gotten COVID four times. Four. I’m fine.

AC: Existential Reckoning was released in October 2020; official work on the album began years before that. How did the early days of the pandemic affect Puscifer’s ability to write and record the album?

MJK: We approached it like we have every other recording: just piece by piece listening, responding, tracking. Either tracking in our studio in LA or tracking out here in Arizona, in the studio out here. Didn’t really affect us much. We’re isolated and when you’re in the studio, you’re basically isolated anyway, so that really didn’t change anything.

AC: Did spending time at home and isolated from others help Puscifer proceed with any clarity on Existential Reckoning and its meanings? In a sense, did the album provide you with any kind of existential reckoning personally?

MJK: In general, we just write from where we are, but a lot of the stuff on the record was reflective of things that preceded the pandemic. Surely some of the stuff seeped in during, but for the most part those observations are just my perception of the world as it progresses. That’s kind of what we do as artists. We observe, interpret and then report. So I think it’s probably a combo of prior and post.

AC: In “Bedlamite” we hear the words “Remarkable resilience through calamity, it’s gonna be alright,” and that offers us a hopeful note. It’s been two years since the start of the pandemic; we’re not quite out of the woods yet, although things are a little better than they were. Do we have reason to believe that everything’s “gonna be alright?”

MJK: It always will be. It’s a pendulum, these changes we go through. It’s like a big, huge pendulum and it swings left and right. And eventually it finds its balance. That’s what nature does, even in forgetting that we’re part of nature. That’s why we think it might never end. But we are part of this marvel, and that balance will be struck. So whatever changes are coming, it will find balance with or without us.

AC: Are you excited to get back out touring with Puscifer?

MJK: Yeah. Like I said, I’ve been out since January, and now it’s time to go.

AC: I understand that you’re going to be in Austin on June 15. Did it ever seem like a small town to you or was it always a big, thriving city?

MJK: When I was stationed at Fort Hood and I would make the hour drive to Austin, it seemed like a big, huge city to me coming from a remote desert post. It’s always seemed like a big, fun place to me.

AC: And as a musician, it seems like a big city?

MJK: Well, when I can drive down and stand in front of the club that I used to go to in 1984, 1985, that building’s still there. It’s still painted black. The street looks the same. So I guess maybe gentrification hasn’t really reached that neighborhood yet. And I would imagine if I were to explore more of the sprawl, it might seem different. I know that there’s better coffee now than there used to be back in 1985.

AC: Are you anticipating getting any time to explore Austin during this tour or will that have to wait for another day?

MJK: Usually on the road you have a singular mission: just get it done. We focus on the show and anything that we’re tweaking from the night before, the weeks before, just kind of dial it in to make sure that you present everything in a cohesive, theatrical manner. Make sure we get the songs right.

AC: How often do you get to explore the cities that you’ve been through while touring?

MJK: Depends on days off. Sometimes we have two days off in the city and so we can go exploring a little bit. But generally speaking, what with the farm here and the vineyard and the winery and the ducks and quail and the dogs and everything else in Arizona, I tend to – when I’m not touring – just explore my own backyard.