Lateralus

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10 Things You Didn't Know About Tool's 'Lateralus'

A badass factoid that many Tool fans regard with Biblical importance, some of the lyrics from "Lateralus," if charted syllabically, follow the numeric pattern of Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa's famed Fibonacci Sequence Let's untangle this a bit: In the sequence — which correlates with the "Golden Ratio," a pattern that appears throughout nature — each number equals the sum of the previous two. The 16th number in the sequence is 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, , , , , During the writing process, bassist Justin Chancellor brought in a riff that, after some workshopping, evolved into measures of 9, 8 and 7.

It came from trying to relate to those things in life or nature we all have in common It's something that people have been studying since the beginning of time. So we wanted to apply that to our music — that's why we got more into the idea behind science, metaphysics and the myth of communication.

Keenan then built some of his lyrics around the sequence, using words with syllables climbing from numbers one through six and back down — in a haiku-like structure: It's a nifty feat of verbal symmetry, but Keenan regrets the approach. I could do better. Tool layered lots of weird shit into the mix — including the electrical crackling from a "Jacob's Ladder" transformer — as they indulged in the studio.

Much of the experimentation was Carey's territory. I got some good samples from that, banging on the strings for 'Resolution,'" he told Modern Drummer. The Tibetan monk sounds you hear on the record are just me growling through a tube. That was the initial sample, and then I overdubbed an Oberheim through a Vocoder.

Before this record, we were really rigid about being able to perform every note live, but we got away from that for this one. Maynard is doing more harmonies and doubling on his voices, and Adam did more guitar overdubs. According to the Toolshed fan site, Keenan once noted that the ambient interlude "Mantra" is the slowed-down sound of him squeezing his Siamese cat. Given Tool's love of saying weird shit in interviews, it's best to take that one with a grain of salt.

Perhaps on a future reissue, we'll hear an extended cut of Keenan's cat-squeezing. The album title is something of a dual reference, nodding to both the thigh muscle vastus lateralis and the concept of "lateral thinking" "[ Lateralis ] itself is actually a muscle, and although the title does have something to do with the muscle, it's more about lateral thinking and how the only way to really evolve as an artist — or as a human, I think — is to start trying to think outside of the lines and push your boundaries," Keenan told Aggro Active in May Oh, the good ol' days when a five-year interim between Tool albums felt like a summer vacation Tool became involved in another lengthy legal battle in , this time involving artwork and an insurance company, and that insane headache only slowed down their progress on the most highly anticipated heavy music LP of all time.

So we really did this album in about a year, which in my mind is pretty good.

But you know what? There were a lot of little things that got in the way of us completing the record on time. I think [ everything ] that could have gone wrong with this album did, from little things like broken gear to bigger issues like getting involved in a lawsuit with our label. I was telling the band as we got on a plane to go to the mastering studio in Maine that I wouldn't be surprised if we crashed.

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And we had to get through that a little bit before we could get back to the creative process. Tool performed live just two days after the terrorist attack in Grand Rapids, Michigan — and Keenan admitted they were "finding it very difficult to concentrate. Take the feelings you've experienced in the last few days and hang on to them, good or bad, and please create something positive with them," he told the crowd, according to The Grand Rapids Press ' live review. It was horrible, but we have to heal. We're just a band, but if we can just take someone away from all of that and they can smile for a little bit because of us, we've done something worthwhile.

The line "As below so above and beyond, I imagine" is a quote from one of the Seven Aphorisms of Summum and is also a direct reference to Hermeticism and the Emerald Tablet. An interesting side note, in alchemy "The Great Work" begins with the Nigredo black , then moves to the Albedo white , then the Citrinitas yellow , then the Rubedo Red. In July Maynard's friend Joe Rogan described his writing process in a podcast; "He wrote a song to the Fibonacci sequence.

The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical sequence. It began linking up to the Fibonacci sequence.

Red and yellow then came to be 8 , reaching out to me 5. Lets me see 3. He descends back down with the following pattern; Drawn beyond the lines of reason 8. Push the envelope 5.

Watch it bend 3. The song's introduction also ends at the 1 minute and 37 seconds mark, where the first verse then begins. This time is significant, as it is a reference to the Golden Ratio. Rounding the Golden Ratio to four places gives 1.

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When converted to minutes and seconds, 1. This also ties it to the Fibonacci sequence as the ratio of one Fibonacci number to its predecessor tends towards the Golden Ratio. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved 11 August Archived from the original on April 20, Retrieved April 25,

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