Tool is known for its powerful works. Most notably so in the album 10,000 days. I personally feel the most connectivity and energy from the works within this record, such as the Pot, Vicarious, and Wings for Marie.

I feel a lot of energy from Wings of Marie specifically, because Maynard wrote it about his mother who had a disease that disabled her from her waist down, so the song giving her wings represents him giving her ability to move. It also is about his mother’s passing, and her acceptance into whatever afterlife exists as he is giving her the wings to discover and find her way there.

Confusingly, the song The Pot is very twisted and hard to discover alone. The music video displays a man who lives on a farm and can’t grow his crops, so he finds a way to make himself cry to water them all, and they all grow the next morning. However, they’re oversized and a bunch of large snails eat them all and travel to a city killing people driving down a road. Eventually, they stop to a window with a girl in her underwear, and take her, then the video abruptly ends.

As can be seen, it’s pretty hard to interperet a theme based on the video, as there appears to be many of them. However, if you study the lyrics specifically, you can find that it’s very powerful in a few elements, not too many to count. For instance, in the line “Soapbox, house of cards, and glass, so don’t go tossin’ your stones around,” Maynard is telling us how people get up on a soapbox and preach about what everyone is doing wrong, but they are standing in a flimsy house of cards. And people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, because eventually they get back what they’ve dished out.

Vicarious is much less confusing as its meaning is way more straight forward, but definitely deep. The song, however, is more down to earth than usual from Maynard. It hits hard because it is not about hidden meanings. At first, the lack of mystery is almost disappointing for a die-hard fan, but the song itself is devastating and true tool. The meaning, as I see it: we consume information about the world’s tragedies like vultures because, in part, it satisfies a need of ours. Why can’t we just admit it? Because this vicariousness is horribly shameful. So we lie about it. Maynard tells us to accept the truth, though, he really doesn’t need or want to “say it all again”.

Tool has always made really deep songs that are accurate to what really goes on in our lives and the struggles within. Maynard is a maniac in terms of musical writing, and he will forever be known as one of the best.