Our band has always been really big on imagery. We've kind of used that as one of our strengths; we tend to do that pretty well.
All the art for Tool is done by the me and the band.
I have the '77 Million Paintings' running in my studio a lot of the time. Occasionally I'll look up from what I'm doing and I think, 'God, I've never seen anything like that before!' And that's a real thrill.
The visuals are equally as important as the music. It's all a complete experience.
I feel it's my job as the artist who is making the music to pair it with visuals that I see in my head while writing the music in the first place.
Whether it be tour posters, album packaging, videos, stage design, etc., the visual aspect of music is very important to us.
All my album artwork is body painting.
I think it gets boring (for the audience) for the lead singer to have a guitar hanging on them all the time.
The bloody nose was the album cover for my first album, but it's since become my logo.
I really loved taking photos when I was younger. I think my love for photography sparked my love for creating the visuals to support my music.
My real motivation came from my quest for music videos to have the equally soul-touching emotional resonance that straight music does. Honestly, I'm not sure they ever can.
I have taken taking my music to labels for years, and everyone just thought it was creepy. They thought the images with the music were weird and verging on psychotic.
I purposely try to make my music cinematic. I try to inspire visuals even though I'm only an instrument of sound.
In England, I'm already labeled a rock photographer, which is a little insulting, because I'm not a rock photographer at all.
The concept and vision of 'Electronic Nature' is to give my fans a fully immersive sensory experience of music, visuals and more.
I've always been super into photography and the visuals that support my music.
I always had a dream about trying to make a movie that had no dialogue in it, that was just music and pictures. I still haven't done it yet, but I tried to get close in the beginning.
2018 was an amazing year for me, and music has changed so much: the way you can release it and the ways you can create art around it, the videos, the ways fans can interact, tour in new places.
Music videos, to me, are like an extension of a song.
I've always been a fan of album covers with no writing on them and have used them a lot in my own groups.
I like visual images and there are certainly other bands that have strong visual images going all the way back to Elvis Presley, but it's kind of like that's never really been my bag. Probably because I'm too shy.
I'm a very visually motivated person. Music is always going to be the thing I'm most motivated by, but music and visuals go hand in hand.
I'm super interested in visual, and I love that being in a band can be as much about making an image as it is about making a sound.
It is so beautiful that when you watch the film, the marriage between the visuals, the music and the storytelling is seamless.
There's some connection between visual images and music. But there's plenty of old records where I have no idea what the band looked like, or even what sort of context the music was played in.
