Danny Carey

The sincerity of delivery is what always strikes me when I hear a good band. It's artist-expression driven, as opposed to being record-producer driven. There's a huge difference. One's motivation is impure, while the other is the highest form of expression, so that's what you aim for.

You can equate our music to childbirth. It's brutal and harsh, but there's still a beautiful thing occurring.

Every record I've ever done with Tool has been on tape.

Those late '60s early '70s bands would take it really far out and get super-weird.

It seems like on every record we have this big, epic thing like 'Rosetta,' 'Wings For Marie' or 'Lateralus.'

We got full artistic integrity and autonomy over what we were doing, and that was the main important thing that kept our band alive.

We've never really been susceptible to pressure from anyone from the outside. We've been really good at negating any outside influences. We're really hard on ourselves. The filter that we put upon things qualifying to end up on a Tool record is pretty extreme, so we figure we've got that part of it under control.

I've been taking tabla lessons and they've helped expand my rhythmic horizons.

I think there is a collective unconsciousness, or some sort of consciousness, that you can tap into if you're open and brave enough to let everything go and be part of that.

We've always considered our music to be a healing process. It's our 'tool' to work things out with each other and try to communicate with each other and learn things. And it's good for everyone - us and our audience - to get together.

Stylistically, we're trying to push things in different ways, but it always comes out sounding like Tool no matter what we're trying to do.

All my best drumming, I'm sure, has never been recorded.

We're not really in the business to sell ourselves. We want to sell what we work on.

We have pretty much all the facets of our business under our control now. Relying on someone else to do the right thing, you're just setting yourself up to get screwed. We control our own destiny and it's a really good feeling.

It's pretty weird to me that our music is as popular as it is.

Our fans are loyal as can be, that's for sure.

It kind of renews my faith in humankind that there's long attention spans left out there that can listen to a 12-minute song.

It drove me mad not being able to know more about Pink Floyd when I was a little kid. But that's the great thing - there was this mystery behind it, and we couldn't find out enough. It made your mind work, it made you seek after it or try to interpret it. It made you envision or imagine what they were doing.

There are no leftover Tool songs because of the process it takes to compose our songs - the way we hash it out in a room with all three or four of us, that there's tons of riffs and jams and things. But there's no put-together songs that are sitting in the eaves.

No one can be their best every night.