Quotes from Justin Chancellor

I'm a big Beethoven fan, and you'll struggle to find a three-minute song on any of his stuff.

There's a vulnerability to our music that attracts people.

Playing '10,000 Days' in concert was very challenging but infinitely rewarding. It's much more sensitive and emotional than our other songs, and it requires pacing yourself and also being very vulnerable.

Writing is a grueling process for us, and once we finish an album, we go on tour for a couple of years. Plus, we're always very involved in our own business, so we need a break when we come back.

Anything you spend a long time on, of course it would be nice if everyone likes it. But I think the strength that we've got is that we always concentrate on what we want it to be like and not really trying to please other people.

We lock ourselves away and we concentrate on what we're doing and try not to think about the madness that's surrounding it, and all the hype.

We're our own worst critics.

If you're going to play bass, then play bass how you play bass. You can learn technique and theory, but we want to hear what you have to offer.

I used to aspire to being more of a traditional bass player, to be honest. People say I play it like a guitar - and I was a guitar player when I was growing up. I started learning when I was eight, and that's what I was fascinated with in my teen years.

When you're getting older, you think about what you have to offer, and what's the point of your life.

It's very rare that we play a gig and we all come off and say 'That was great, I had a great time!' There's always someone that's had a bad time. So the goal is always to achieve the next level of performing the piece that you've written. You're looking for something that you haven't even captured on the album.

We are all musicians, and we're not really good musicians. But we have this gracious gift that has been bestowed on us, and we don't want to disappoint. So I guess our biggest fear would be, just giving up.

Maybe you have a particular type of sound you want to go for, but if you really want to be original, there's no real recipe for that. For me it's just about letting it come to you... if you can let your head clear out, then almost anything is available.

The last thing I do is go and listen to heavy rock music. But I love electronic music. The purity of the tones is inspiring, because it's obviously much more controlled than a guitar tone.

I was living in London with my brother, and he was a friend of Matt Marshall, who signed Tool. So we were the first people over in Europe to get the first Tool demo in 1991, and me and my brother immediately cottoned on to it.

The whole thing about Tool is that it kind of feeds on itself. If it's going, it's going. If it's at a grinding halt, there's either the will to pick it up again and get it going or not. We've been through serious stages of nothing... business problems or personal problems or whatever.

The whole idea is preserving the music and the art and not having us and our faces and our individual characters distract from that. That was the original idea, and now it's really become part of what Tool is. It has allowed us to really concentrate on our music and our show.

In the end, our way of writing music is a long process of experimentation. We enjoy the luxury of taking this very seriously and giving it the time that it needs.

I don't know what I did to my main bass. I've poured makeup into it, I've bashed it around - and we've gone in the back and cleaned it up... It sounds amazing and one of a kind at this point, but it picks up a really decent radio signal if you're anywhere near an antenna.

We don't ever write stuff individually and say, 'OK, this is gonna be the song.' We bring in ideas in their rawest form and bounce them around to find the thing that is bigger than any individual's idea.

If you start to believe the hype about yourself, then you start to lose the bigger picture, and your focus is in the wrong place.

You have to be completely brave and sincere about what you're doing to just not ever compromise and change it to what you think someone else might want.

As you grow older, you want to learn, you want to change, you want to evolve and you don't want to live in fear. Fear is the mind killer.

I'm ashamed to say it, but I watch YouTube videos of our live shows, wondering if it actually sounded the way it sounded when I was playing it, and the consistent thing I see is that you can feel the anxiety and the tension and it's over-aggressive a lot of the time.