60 Songs That Explain the '90s - Tool—“Stinkfist”

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

Rob explores Los Angeles metal band Tool’s “Stinkfist” by discussing how they found success mixing visceral shock and poetic depth in their music. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Laina Dawes Producers: Isaac Lee and Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to a music and talk episode where full songs and talk segments play together only on Spotify. Best of all, you can create your own music and talk show for free with Anchor Spotify's podcasting platform. Get started at anchor.fm-fm-fm-M-C-H-O-R-M-U-S-I-S-I-C-A-N-D-T-A-L-K. A lot of spelling there, but just do it. When you go out somewhere, to a friend's house, to a restaurant, to a bar, to a movie, whatever. While you're there,

do you think about the music you're going to listen to on the drive home or the walk home, the subway home, whatever? Do you build your entire day? Do you build your entire life around the music you will listen to while you live it? Have you always been this way? Just way too intense about the soundtrack to your life, perhaps for the detriment, ultimately, of your personal life? Yeah, me neither. Anyways, this one time 24 and a half years ago, I was driving home from my buddy Joe's house

listening to the Tool song, Third Eye. Third Eye is 13 minutes and 51 seconds long. It is the final track, the dramatic conclusion of Tool's 1996 album, Onama. Third Eye starts with a naked heartbeat. Tool are a bodily fluid heavy band. Blood is not, by a long shot, the most unpleasant bodily fluid one might encounter during a tool album.

For example, anima is A-E-N-I-M-A, ideally with the first A and the E squished together, fancy Latin style. This album title combines the Latin word for soul, that's just A-N-I-M-A, with the word enema, which, yeah. Okay, now add Bill Hicks to the heartbeat. Because you know what, the musicians who made all that great music that's enhanced your lives throughout the year, Real fucking high on drugs. Bill Hicks, the stand-up comedian, tells you something. I mean, the presence of Bill Hicks tells you something.

He is beloved by a certain type of person, a freethinker, a non-conformist, a devil's advocate, a dark philosopher, a pain in the ass, but a thoughtful pain in the ass. Bill died in 1994. His podcast would have been just chaos. So add a couple more Bill Hicks clips, add some ominous guitars,

and shit, add some drums, at a drum solo, basically, already, before even 90 seconds have transpired. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is 60 songs that explain the 90s. Today I'm talking about tools stink fist. Eventually, that's another song, obviously, windy intros, long digressions, excessive amounts of atmosphere, drum solos, various sophomoric indulgences, all crucial aspects of the tool like. style embrace the journey. I am 18 years old. I'm driving a beat-up Chrysler-Laboran across 20 minutes of rural Northeast Ohio at around 19 minutes to midnight, trying to make curfew in a thunderstorm. At 18, I'm getting a little old to have a midnight curfew. Maybe I didn't have a midnight curfew at this point. The story works better with the curfew. The tool album, Onima, is in my portable

CD player with the cassette adapter so it would work through the tape deck of my car stereo. You plugged it all into the cigarette lighter, laborious process, you really had to want it. I'm listening to Third Eye. If I catch the streetlights right and drive like a dumbass, 18-year-old, I might conceivably make it home before the end of Third Eye. I'm a dumbass, but frankly, a conformist dumbass. I don't know Bill Hicks. I don't do drugs. I don't use the cigarette lighter for any other purpose. I make curfew generally, but I embraced with uncomfortable intensity, the Tool lifestyle. And when the baseline, the third eye first kicked in, that's when this painfully mundane event, I drove home, transformed in my brain forevermore into an electrifying

and terrifying and mind-altering an altogether formative life experience. I got third eye. Tool are a four-man rock and roll band from Los Angeles, California, an art rock band, a metal band, an alternative metal band, a progressive metal band, a heavy band. What are, Toll, what is life? What is the soul? What was I doing at my buddy Joe's house immediately prior to this? Do I forget now what teenage boys did together socially in the 90s, or do I just not want to tell you? I got nothing to hide. Perhaps we were playing Tecmo Super Bowl. for the 8-bit NES. Perhaps we were dubbing a Weezer CD onto cassette, perhaps. Exactly one time, as I recall, we were on the phone with a girl. Perhaps we were browsing my buddy Joe's parents' home-taped VHS collection of erotic thrillers, multiple shelves of these, Sea of Love starring Al Pacino and so forth. Maybe don't ask what I was doing. Easier question, what do the dudes and tool think of L.A. really? The title track to Anima, except the song spelled A-E-N-E-M-A, is about despising the narcissism of Hollywood so thoroughly that you're praying for an earthquake that causes California to tumble into the sea. So that answers that.

Third Eye is slightly more open to interpretation, but it's probably about taking peyote to achieve higher consciousness and come to grips with the traumas of your childhood. Or at least Toole's frontman, Maynard James Keenan, sings several verses with imagery to this. effect, creepy blue faces with three eyes, people tumbling down holes, malevolent games of hide-and-seek, nightmarish, desert tabloes, so on and so forth. The most effective of these verses, in my opinion, is whispered. Third Eye is a song of colossal volume shifts and tonal shifts. It's a cheesy late-night monster movie. It's an erotic thriller.

It's a slapstick comedy. It's faces of death. It's the seventh seal. In your curfew following teenage years, did the thing happen where you came home basically at the same time every Saturday night, so like four minutes after midnight every time? And your dad was waiting up for you and watching TV and you'd sit with him for a while and watch the end of whatever movie he'd been watching. And somehow it was always the same movie every time. And at 12.4 a.m., it was always at the exact same moment in the movie. So essentially you watched the last 20 minutes of one movie like 200 times.

My dad and I had that with the Blues Brothers, the Saturday Night Live, spin-off, Dan Akroyd and John Belushi. I'd walk in right when Cab Calloway was singing Minnie the Moutcher, and then I'd sit and watch the wacky, climactic car chase. It takes like 20 minutes. John Candy's police cruiser crashes into a semi. Great movie. Anyways, the moments of near silence in Third Eye, I find in this car, in this late teenage moment to be especially electrifying. I am leaning closer to my car stereo at this point. I am grinding my steering wheel into dust.

I am taking every flash of lightning, as though it is a sign from a god that may not, according to Maynor James Keenan, exist. Phosphorescent desert buttons. Yeah, we got it. Dig the kick drum there as well. Seven beats. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

It's a cool little motif. These are thoughtful guys. Anyway, now's about the time when Maynard starts screaming, which is something Maynard's quite good at. And it turns out that I find this to be pretty electrifying also. I think I possibly strained my right bicep just now, pumping my fist to that too hard. Such are the perils of no longer being 18. This song rules. Four minutes are so left in this song.

There's a guitar solo, et cetera. I got to move on. I'd just like to note that there's more rad screaming at the end of Third Eye, but now the rhythm is trickier. So those are my feelings on one tool song. Not even the tool song this episode is about, to reiterate, that would be Stinkfish. Bear with me.

Somehow, today I drank three times my normal quantity of iced coffee. Tool formed in 1990, Maynard James Keenan on vocals, Adam Jones on guitar, Danny Carey on drums, and Paul DeMore on bass. Though in 1995, Paul left

and was replaced by current bassist Justin Chancellor. In the early 90s, the definitions of rock and roll and hard rock and alternative rock and heavy metal were changing dramatically. The shameless extravagance of hair metal is colliding in midair with the self-loathing ferocity of grunge. 1991, of course, would bring both Nirvana's Nevermind in the major label Gold Rush to find the next Nirvana. Lots of loud and crunchy and scary rock bands getting signed. all of a sudden, Tool among them. Tools first release, an EP called Opiate, came out in 1992. That's Opiate, as in Religion, is the Opiate of the Masses.

Carl Marx, you get it. My favorite song on Opiate is called Jerk Off, with a hyphen, jerk-hyphen off. So it's a noun. So like you're playing Tecmo Super Bowl, and you're like, just hike the ball already, jerk off. I told you Maynard's good at screaming. is jerk hyphen off a song about shooting somebody or a song about interrogating the complex moral calculus behind

justifying your decision to shoot somebody choose your own adventure either it's not that deeper it's bottomless either these guys are stupid as hell or they're the most intellectually stimulating rock band born in the 20th century you can think Tool are stupid as hell and still love them by the way but as an 18 year old

I myself found them to be quite intellectually stimulating Tool's full-length debut album, Undertoe, came out in 1993. Their breakout hit on MTV and All Rock Radio and so forth was called Sober. Really good at screaming. Here then is the wider world's introduction to the tool aesthetic, the hardness, the harshness, the desolation. That bass tone, especially, j-j-j-j-d-if. If you are not in the mid-90s, a metal person, a heavy music person per se, Tool may have been for you the heaviest and most extreme music you still felt comfortable liking.

But the tool aesthetic was as much visual as audible, and the visuals were designed to make you super uncomfortable. The MTV approved video for sober, it's claymation, but like gross claymation. There's this old guy trudging through a creepy old house. His head melts at one point. There's a meat tunnel. The video is arguably more influential than the song itself, and it's definitely scarier. This applied to Tools cover art and their CD booklets as well. The liner notes to undertow alone would have gotten me grounded.

I'd rather not elaborate. Adam Jones, the guitar player, handled Tools videos. He'd worked on movies, done special effects for Ghostbusters 2, and Terminator 2, and Predator 2, and just to mix things up, a nightmare on Elm Street 5. The final verdict on The Sober Video comes to us courtesy of Beavis and Butthead. Cool. If I could move my arm that fast, I'd never leave the house. Listener, when I found this clip again today, I physically fell out of my chair laughing.

I am serious. I have never done that before in my life. Incredible. I just about died. Tool were so grim and so badass and so intense and so disturbing that you could also find them, perhaps as a defense mechanism, hilarious. This band made you electrifyingly uncons. comfortable. As a teenager, at least I had no idea how seriously to take these people. Tools' next gross claymation video, a lot of amputated limbs and cracked up skulls, etc., was for a song called Prison Sex. Beavis and Butthead watched that video, too, but it's not nearly as funny. One very upsetting way to pass from adolescence into adulthood is to realize that for years, you'd misheard this next line as, inside of me. I don't think it's inside of me.

Maynard's frequent references in his lyrics to molestation, to abuse, to trauma, coupled with the gross claimation videos and Beavis and Butthead's jokes about those videos, coupled with a stupid Tool bumper sticker that was a wrench that looked like a penis, all of this was terribly destabilizing tonally and emotionally. Is this a joke? Is this dick joke? You didn't know what to think. You didn't know how to feel. This was, of course, by design. Tool very much did not want to give anyone answers. to any of your questions. For a band of their prominence, Tool joined the Lala Palooza Tour in 1992, 93, and 97, they did very little press, very few interviews, very few photo shoots.

Picture them however you want. Project onto them whatever personality or philosophy or trauma you want. Take them deadly seriously or just assume they're joking about literally everything. Did Adam Jones really work on Ghostbusters 2?

Don't bet your life on that. Choose your own adventure. Take from all this, whatever it is you need. My favorite song on Undertow when I was 15 was called Swamp Song. See if you can guess why. Who do you suppose Maynard is talking to here? Forget Maynard, actually. Who do you suppose 15-year-old me pretended I was talking to here?

Neither of these questions are addressed in the official tool frequently asked questions file. Tools pressed near blackout, this vacuum of low information and active disinformation, was filled, naturally, by obsessive tool fans in the early days of the widespread internet. The tool FAQ was last updated in February 2001 and runs 16,594 words. It's this very weird and pleasing mixture of direct press quotes and fan conjecture. Per fan speculation, the band name tool is probably not a reference to the band being a helpful tool in the study of lacromology, which is the 50-year-old Philist. philosophical study of crying as therapy or spiritual advancement through physical or emotional pain.

Lacromology probably does not exist. The band name Tool is probably a dick joke. Sixteen and a half thousand words. I highly recommend it. Read all of it and maybe then you'll know for sure what the song Stinkfist is about. By 1996 Tool are rock stars. Their second full-length album, Anima, debuted at number two on the Billboard album chart. Behind a posthumous Nirvana live album. Oh well. Plenty of options now. If transgressive rock stars are your thing, you got downward spiral era nine inch nails, you got Marilyn Manson, you got skinny puppy and ministry and cam FDM and so forth if you're of a more industrial mindset. But nobody else thought of calling their new album's lead single, Stink Fist. Every chorus ups the anti-transgression-wise,

cue the beavis and butthead snickering or don't. The tool FAQ discusses stink fist at some length. A tool fan with an AOL.com email address suggests that, quote, it is using a fist up the ass metaphor for the desensitizing of the public, end quote. In other words, perhaps tooler just going door to door trying to shock people. I dare say it worked at the time.

They played this song on the radio. They played this song on MTV. Yet another grody Adam Jones video, it's stop motion. They're sand people, I think. They eat nails. They rip their skin off, they convulse. MTV, though, would not actually call this song StinkFist.

It was listed as track number one because it's the first track on Onoma. MTV VJ Matt Pinfield apologized on the air at one point because MTV would not let him say StinkFist on the air. What a delightful state of affairs for a transgressive teenager or a conformist teenager who fancies himself a transgressive. But I'd argue now that the most provocative aspect of Stinkfist, as a song is that it was also beautiful in places, melodically beautiful, and if you took it seriously enough, maybe even philosophically beautiful. Everything is up to you here, so it's up to you to decide if Tool represent the death of subtlety or the triumphant exquisite refinement of subtlety.

That question is not answered in the FAQ. Regardless, Tool offered experienced headbangers and headbanging novices alike, a wide variety of thoughtful head-banging experiences. For example, here's a pretty decent seven-word description of what it's like to be a teenager. Onama, the album, was nearly movie length, 77 minutes or so. There's a 10-minute dirge called Push It,

whose title squishes together the words, Push and shit. There is a song in which someone recites in German in a political rally dictator-type voice, a recipe for weed cookies. There's a song called 46. and two. The FAQ suggests it's about chromosomes and

Jungian theory. I suggest it is a fantastic airbase song, airbase being a cooler and more sophisticated form of air guitar. I'm a big airbase guy. Maybe you've guessed this about me by now. If you're ever in a car with me listening to

46 and 2 and I'm driving, this right here would be the moment to double check that your seatbelt is securely fastened. In that same vein, I would advise that you just get out of the car and start walking when the song called Hooker with a penis comes on. Yes, that's what it's called. The backstory here allegedly is that a fan criticized Maynard for signing to a major label and therefore selling out and therefore sucking up to the man. This confrontation,

whether it be real or imaginary, went about as well as you'd expect. Delightful, cathartic, therapeutic, excellent airbase music. If only the world, had remained this simple. I saw Tool in concert at a college basketball arena in Columbus, Ohio on September 14, 2001, three days after 9-11. Tool's third album, Lateralist had come out a few months earlier and debuted at number one this time. They were getting progier, is the word I'll use. This is not a complaint. Lateralist is pretty rad, too, but it was therefore astounding that they also seemed to be getting more popular. But that night, I really needed catharsis. I imagine everyone did. Tool opened with a new song called The Grudge. Then they played Stinkfist. Then they played 46 and 2.

Then they played prison sex. And then Maynard James Keenan, free thinker and nonconformist and devil's advocate, talked to us for a little while. Seems we're kind of faced with some new choices. They're all choices, but they're being presented again over and over again. The choices, of course, are do we choose fear? Do we choose love and compassion? We choose compassion and love. Listening to this now, I am struck.

You could say I'm disturbed even by that crowd roar after, do we choose fear? Because I know that my 23-year-old voice is part of that. that roar. In that roar, I hear catharsis in it, and I also hear pain, and I also hear rage, and I also hear confusion, and I also hear a desperate thirst for revenge, and I also hear fear. And I know now, of course, where all of that would lead. Maynard's little speech there, perhaps inevitably, led to a chant of USA, USA. We just got our asses kicked. You might want to hold the applause for just a minute until we figure out what we did wrong.

We didn't really do that, did we? So maybe now when I think of Tool, the reason I think of Third Eye first is that I think I was safer in that car. Is a naive 18-year-old and the world was simpler. Which I didn't know now, what I didn't know then, and all that sort of thing. But that's all naive, too. Tool as a band was, and always will be, an ugly proposition, an ugly provocation. One of this band's most enduring provocations is how beautiful that ugliness can be, how life-affirming that terror can be, how purifying that grossness can be. Think for yourself, keep your third eye open, take drugs if you want, don't take any shit off anybody. I still get what I want from this band, even if I wish I didn't need it. And so we keep digging until we feel something.

Chrysler-Laborans against the current, born forward, ceaselessly into the future. My guest today is Lena Dawes, a critic and photographer and author of the book, What Are You Doing Here, a Black Woman's Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal? Thanks so much for being here, Lena. I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you for having me. Of course. You've written so much about metal. for people who love heavy music and listen primarily to heavy music,

what is the general perception of tool? Do they get credit for being like one of the five 90s metal bands that pretty much anyone can name? Or does that more general popularity sort of work against them with people who are more immersed in heavy music? Yeah, I think that generally they get lost. They're not really included in the conversation. I think one of the reasons is the music itself. also what was happening in the 90s, you know, at that time, and also kind of how their music was responded to within that time of the 90s.

So it was a little bit more exploratory, a little bit more artistic, and maybe a little bit more subversive than a lot of the other bands that were coming out at that time. So, I mean, just in thinking about their catalog in general, I was thinking about that. I was thinking even like, are they even heavy metal? Right. You even categorize them as heavy metal. I don't know if I would, and I don't know if they would identify as heavy metal for whatever that's worth.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't think so. When you think about 90s metal, like, what do you picture when you picture 90s metal? Like, what is the foundation that they're sort of reacting against? There's a couple of things. I mean, at the beginning of the 1990s, you had this descendants from glam metal, hair metal. or like, I call it sunset strip metal. Yes.

Whatever that is. Absolutely. You know, so bands like poison were going down. Motley crew was kind of in this weird transition. Right. You know, like, yeah, guns and roses were doing. But I think guns and roses are a really good example because guns and roses was, it was hard rock. It wasn't metal.

And it was ballots. And there was enough kind of, you know, a few. years later when you're getting into November rain, they were really interested in like the symphonics and maybe a little bit of classical music. But, you know, like they were trying to broaden their listenership. Yeah. So Tool kind of came in as these kind of strange oddball guys who were phenomenally talented in terms of as individual musicians.

But together it was, you know, and you had these like really interesting time. changes. You had Maynard who is a character upon himself, not only as a singer, but the stuff that he does outside. I remember back then he had not a moot, but he had like

that weird shaped sides and the hair going down. Like his hair was quite long in the back. Very intense situation. Yeah. Yeah. And that was just a style that was not happening back then because then you get into you know, in the 90s, then you get into the new metal scene.

Yeah. And And so the aesthetics of that, plus the music, were completely different than what was coming out of the L.A. You know, sunset strip stuff. Right. And then you also had grunge. And maybe tool is more into the grunge aesthetic and maybe philosophical bent, but not necessarily the music. Right. Because what they were doing was way more interesting and in some ways,

introspective in terms of how it made the listener feel. Tool is not something that you would want to, you know, drink PBRs with your friends with. You know, it was more of something you would want to listen to in a darkened room and just really think about what Maynard was saying and just think about the musicianship. So it was serious music. It's never made sense to me that Maynard owns a winery, that he's like a big wine guy, but you saying that just now, suddenly it makes perfect sense, actually,

that's a big one guy. That's more the vibe of Tool. That's more his vibe from the beginning. I've always been fascinated by the tool aesthetic, like the videos and like the bumper stickers and just how creepy and how menacing and how like sophomoric they could be. Like you're watching MTV and here's a video for a song called prison sex.

Like you have to decide how seriously you think they're taking this. Like for you, what effect did the visuals have on a music? Well, I think that in terms of the visuals, they came out in such an incredible era of music, a video production. Like, there was a lot of bands that were putting out some incredible music videos back then. You know, this was back when people actually had money and they were willing to spend it on artists. So, you know, it was kind of, yeah, disturbing. There was one that reminds me of the human centipede for some reason.

You know that movie? It's all, it seems like all of them, but yeah, it could be any of them. But yes, unfortunately, I know what you mean. Yeah, so they were, you know, they were dark and, you know, being young back then and them, the videos being dark and making you think it was like, oh, my God, this is, I've never seen anything like this. It's so cool, you know, and it really brought, it added into this mysticism we had about the band because as far as I can remember.

you did the interviews with the drummer perhaps, and obviously Maynard, they would do the interviews, but you really didn't know anything about them until much later on. Right. You know, so at the time, it was just, that's all you knew was the occasional interview, you listen to the album, and then you make up your mind watching the visuals that they accompany the latest single. Right.

What's your read on Maynard is like this reluctant, rock star figure. I think to me, you called him an interesting cat, you know, which could go in a few different directions. Well, it's interesting because I think he was always a bit of introvert. Well, it's weird, because the persona versus kind of the backstage stories, right? Right. So the persona was this eccentric man who was a free thinker, did whatever he wanted to do. There was, you know, probably rumors about him drinking blood from some animal or, you know, whatever. Sure. You know, like, because we didn't really know, but he definitely stood out from the pack.

Right. He was a unique figure. He's got an, I think he's got a great voice. Mm-hmm. And his voice really made him stand out, A, because he could actually sing, but B, because he really did have a unique voice. voice that was coming out at that time. While there were singers, you know, like obviously Axel Rose or people like that, I mean, he really had this interesting voice.

And because of this weird symbiotic relationship with the grunge scene, his voice was comparable. Well, okay, this might be a stretch. But I'm thinking about kind of like Chris Cornell. Sure. Absolutely. There was a few. There was like a handful of male singers who.

could really sing, Lane Staley, Eddie Better, Chris Cornell, and then Maynard, you know, and there's probably somebody else in there, too. I can't remember. But they really kind of set the stage for the Thinking Man's music, a Thinking Man's Music, where you really wanted to hear everything. And so that was one aspect. I think in later years, and I think this just came out like in the last year or so where you had these things about he treated women terribly. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and just you're hearing kind of rumors of stuff that went on, which was actually very surprising to me because it was just coming from somebody that I wouldn't expect to be a caveman in that aspect. But, you know,

but then that kind of tells you that regardless of the stick or the brand that this person person, how he wants you to see him. Right. There is a whole other thing that's in some ways very pedestrian in terms of wanting to get into heavy or the music scene to get the chicks, to get laid and to get high and all that BS that you hear everybody else doing.

And so that was kind of not a disappointment, but it was kind of a strange thing to hear about way after as the years went by and now where, you know, it was kind of, you know, coming to the surface now that was very surprising to me. Yeah. Do Tool fans as a community as a monolith strike you as like a separate and distinct entity? Like, is there a different personality that Tools fan base has compared to other even bigger metal or heavy bands? I think so. I think that it's kind of like people well geez I was thinking as in my

the similarities I'm trying to make today are not very good but I'm like it's like dream theater fans you know sure that makes perfect you know what I mean yes okay so it's like so it's people that like nerd out to musicians

people who are probably musicians themselves who are looking to replicate that same type of style that same type of, I guess, that level of musicianship. I know that the drummer's name, who, my apologies. Danny, yeah, I know that he was doing a lot of drum lessons. He was really, you know, like he was really saying, hey, you want to know what I do.

He was doing classes. Like, he was really active in terms of showing people what he was doing, which I thought was really cool. So I imagine that the die hard tool, fans even to this day, they're the ones who are probably musicians themselves or work in the industry and are kind of nerding out to the technicalities of how their music is produced and mixed and engineered and all that stuff. Yeah, when I fancied myself a guitar player in the late 90s and I was looking at like guitar tech magazines where they had tablature for songs, like I would see tool songs and I would just be like,

oh God, like I can't even deal with this. Like it's just they're so daunting as musicians that I can imagine they would attract like hardcore musicians in that way. That makes perfect sense. Yeah. You mentioned to me that you actually prefer possibly a perfect circle to Tool. That's Maynard's other band. I think their first album wasn't until 2000, but like not a popier band, but like any less explicit and intense band compared to Tool. Like what drew you to a perfect circle? I think it was where my head space was at the time, to be honest with you. I like the fact that they had Baz play bass in that band. So I like the fact that there was this mysterious

woman in the band. But I think it was just, yeah, softer, more introspective. And also, I always think that there's a sexually subversive underbelly with Maynard as a person. Yes. And I think it was interesting to see the dualities of his personality in terms of one persona and tool. And then I believe seeing videos of him actually were in clothes in a perfect circle. And actually a perfect circle was a great band. I think, wasn't Jimmy Ha from the Smashing.

James I for a little while was in the band. Yeah. So I mean, it was, I think it was for me, it was like, oh, my God, I'm listening to Smashing Popkins and this guy's here and this person is there. And it's like, I'm into the super group type of thing. So I think it was also kind of wanting to see what other musicians are doing outside of their principal bands. Yeah.

And so Maynard, Baz, and then you had James, right? Yes. It's funny because now I just, I only listen to extreme metal. Like, I don't really listen to much else.

So it is weird thinking back to how I used to, like, in terms of soft music, I mean, that was as soft as I would get. And I don't even listen to that anymore. So, yeah,

it's weird. It's weird how it happens. But yeah, I do. But you know what? I listen to, is it ena enamina? Anima is the way I've always pronounced it.

I hope that's right. But yeah, that's the second album and that's, you know, that the song was a big hit, you know, about Los Angeles, California falling into the sea. Like, yeah, that's the second record. Yeah, and I listened to that again. I hadn't listened to it in years. And I listened to it again yesterday.

And there was a song called Hooker with a penis. Yes, it's a good song. Yeah, it's a, you know, I was thinking, the title did not age well at all. Yes. It's a good point. It's a valid point. I was going to put something on Facebook like,

oh my God, there's a song, hooker with a penis. And then I realized that most of my friends would be pissed off at me. They didn't think that through, possibly. No.

But what was interesting is that, yeah, that's a fantastic song. It really is. Yes. That whole album is so good. Like, I think out of the,

you know, the three that kind of came out in the 90s, I think that for me, I realized, yesterday that that album, I think, is the standout. And it's funny because I was so into undertow and so into Lazarus. And while I owned that album, it was having this revisitation over, oh, God, 20 years, you know, of not listening to it, that you're just like, this was really good. I mean, it was kind of dirty.

I mean, dirty in a good way, you know, but it was, it's such an incredible album. And it's anger. Like it's just, there's a viciousness on that album and a targeted viciousness, a seething that you don't, I don't know if you get that same attitude from Maynard on the other two albums. I think you can only access that, you know, when you're however old he was at the time, what, mid-20s, early 20s, you know, no older, I don't think, you know, like that may, you may just sort of age out of seething with that degree of believability, I guess, is the way to put it. Yeah. But no, that's a great song.

I went and picked up McDonald's for my kids the other day. I was alone in the car and I was playing a hooker with a penis at this incredible volume. I had a nice little dad moment there. Thank you. Thank you so much for talking, Lena. This has been great. We really appreciate it. Oh, thank you.

Thank you very much to my guest this week, Lena Dawes. Thanks to our producers, Justin Sales and Isaac Lee. And thanks, as always, to you for listening. And now, without further ado, it's Tool with Stinkfist. Thanks very much. We'll see you next week.