Maynard James Keenan Quotes

Maybe it's just my improv and sketch background, but I'm a lot more comfortable in a group. I like sharing focus and populating an ensemble.

All your travelling is together, you eat together, you're on stage as a band together, when you get to the sound-check the band and the crew are all together.

A-ha is not me, Paul, or Magne: it is its own individual that has its own identity and characteristics. It is a result of a particular meeting point between the three of us.

From day one, we always admired male R&B groups. They would go onstage with no shirt on and baggy jeans, and girls would scream.

I think when you're young and you get together with a group of guys who think like you and you start to make something that moves you as a group of people and you have a common goal, that's an exciting time.

I just try to do things on stage that I think the audience would enjoy. And I try to draw on and add to acts that I've enjoyed watching.

Once you get on stage, everything is right. I feel the most beautiful, complete, fulfilled. I think that's why, in the case of noncompromising career women, parts of our personal lives don't work out. One person can't give you the feeling that thousands of people give you.

I think more obvious to others, is that I'm most vulnerable on stage. Even though I know which songs I'm going to play, I try and keep it loose and base my stage time more on what the audience is requesting of me.

If you're up there [on stage] thinking about what you're doing, you're just not there and it's not going to happen.So trying to learn how to overcome those - which is a normal thing to do. You're in front of a lot of people. People are going to get very self-conscious. So you have to learn to sort of overcome that tendency towards self-consciousness and just blow it wide open. And you jump in and join all those people that are out there enjoying what you're doing together.

I think I learned a lot about collaboration and about joint creativity with other people. It is honestly so much fun and I don't think that I would have had the same album if I had just written it by myself.

To be effective, leaders must have the qualities and attitudes essential to work in a group setting.

I think what I loved in cinema - and what I mean by cinema is not just films, but proper, classical cinema - are the extraordinary moments that can occur on screen. At the same time, I do feel that cinema and theater feed each other. I feel like you can do close-up on stage and you can do something very bold and highly characterized - and, dare I say, theatrical - on camera. I think the cameras and the viewpoints shift depending on the intensity and integrity of your intention and focus on that.

Theatrical times are different from concert times, to put it simply. Taking a figure like [Mahatma] Gandhi and setting him on a stage requires thinking about what theater is about and what the whole experience is about and what we're trying to communicate in that way, so you get into certain less abstract considerations.

Every time I go out on a stage I consider myself very lucky. Because, in a time where people are economically thinking about what to go and see - so, when I am on a stage, and it doesn't matter where I am, that's my favorite show. I come home after and say "That was my favorite show".

While I have not ruled out the possibility of doing music, what I don't want to do is go onstage and perform old songs. I do, all the time, but I don't think it is artistically brave.

In fact, the collective energy field of presence can be very helpful when people come together. It can give you an enormous boost.

It's impossible for me to play a part without thinking about the audience.

Humans are really interesting. We're so clever, what we do with our brain. How we manage to con ourselves into thinking all sorts of things is really fascinating. By the same token, if we could just convince ourselves of things that would gather us together and powerfully turn things around for the good, that would be awesome. It's doubtful because we're such a fear-based species.

Whenever I'm onstage, I try my best not to think that I'm performing. It's simply another part of my day.

I think it would be so fun to do some kind of comedy, something - I'm not exactly sure, but something like I just did Moliere's "Tartuffe" in class, and wow, what a stretch. Why go to classes? I get to play in Moliere's "Tartuffe," and I could never - nobody would ever think that they would be, I'd be right for that.

Everyone has to do the same work as actors - I teach acting. But there are those people who come on, and there's just something about them in and above themselves that has to do with chemistry and electricity - this aura about them. And that's unmistakable. Do I have that? Yeah, I think I have that.

I think I always knew I was going to somehow be on a stage. I was quite an extrovert, as a child. And I did a lot of music, when I was younger, so I thought I was going to go into music, but I fell into acting, in a really weird way.

I couldn't be a one-woman show, since I wouldn't have anybody to bounce off from. Once you're out there, dribbling on, you have nobody to interrupt you. I love being part of a company, and telling a story.

But it's been funny to try and carry the through line, but I think the main thing is the relationship that the band has because we have spent now all this time together that I think that's sort of what we returning to. And whenever we get to play together, it still sort of returns to that little shitty rehearsal space. So that's good.

I'm so used to it, I think I'd feel very naked on stage without a piano.