Jamey Jasta on Career Longevity, Blocking Out Critics, and Why Tool’s Music Still Doesn’t Hit for Him

Hatebreed frontman Jamey Jasta has once again opened up about his struggle to connect with Tool’s music, despite multiple attempts to appreciate the alternative metal legends. In a recent chat with This Day In Metal, Jasta credited his career longevity to perseverance and an unwavering ability to “block out the detractors, noise, and naysayers.”

During the interview, he briefly touched on his thoughts about Tool’s 2019 comeback album, Fear Inoculum. Despite its critical acclaim and the excitement surrounding the band’s return after 13 years, Jasta admitted he still hasn’t fully embraced its complex and progressive approach.

Here’s what he had to say:

Whatever it is, if it’s writing a book, if it’s making a film, if it’s making a record or writing a poem or fucking making a recipe — I don’t care what it is — you’ve gotta block out the people that maybe don’t believe in you to do it and you’ve gotta find the ones that do and you’ve gotta keep them close and you’ve gotta make sure that you do right by them and that they appreciate what you do and vice versa. And then also, I think it’s gotta be authentic, it’s gotta be from the heart, ’cause the stuff that really resonate to people 10, 20, 30 years in is stuff that I knew in the moment was ‘it’. You just know when you know.

And sometimes you can bring that idea to someone else and they go, ‘Nah’, and they write your shit off. Or you can put your blood, sweat and tears into a record and some reviewer will listen to it once and go, ‘No, this sucks,’ just like I did with the last Tool record that sounded like spa music. And that’s gonna happen. But you’ve gotta roll with the punches and you’ve just gotta have faith that it will find the ears and the eyes that it needs to find.”

Jasta would further elaborating, stating:

I never got into Tool, but every year — every other year, maybe — I’ll go, ‘Hey, I’m gonna try to get into Tool,’ and then someone will recommend a song and then I’ll go listen to the song. And a lot of times I end up liking the song. I never really go back to it, but I will hear it and I can recognize the genius in it. The playing is incredible and the production is incredible and [Maynard James Keenan’s] voice is incredible. I don’t have any desire to really like go back and listen to it again, but I can say, ‘Wow,’ in the moment, when I do go check it out.

It was not too long ago on my Patreon, I was saying, ‘Man, I tried to listen to some song off the last album, and it sounded like I was in a spa in Sedona, waiting to get a massage’ or something. It was atmospheric and mellow and ethereal… I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s like it was something really delicate, soft but calming. And I’m, like, I just wanna listen to Necrot and just fucking [singing] ‘Drill the skull’. I’m just a caveman at heart — I just wanna hear, ‘Drill The Skull.’ And so then I listen to Necrot and I’m thinking, ‘Man, Maynard probably hates this shit.’

You can find the full interview below:

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