During a recent appearance on Amoeba Records‘ popular YouTube series “What’s In My Bag?“, Tool and A Perfect Circle frontman Maynard James Keenan highlighted several of his core musical inspirations. While the singer picked out records by influential rock and experimental acts like Minor Threat, Sonic Youth, Swans, and Devo, he took special time to praise legendary folk-rock singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell.
In the video, Maynard James Keenan explained how he initially discovered her music and why her artistry stood out so prominently.
“My aunt turned me on to Joni Mitchell,” Keenan said (via Metal Hammer). “This is a person who… you kind of dismiss her back in the day as just being this cutesy folk singer with her acoustic guitar, pretty with a big smile, and she was far beyond that. She was writing her own music. All of it. All of those early albums. She was also engineering and producing her own music. So, start to finish, Joni Mitchell wrote her own songs, recorded her own songs, performed her own songs as a solo artist.”
Calling her a “huge influence,” the vocalist also highlighted her highly unconventional approach to the instrument itself.
“She would tune her guitar to whatever mood she was in and write the song from that tuning,” he continued. “So there’s a lot of songs, allegedly, she can’t remember how to play because she can’t remember the tuning.”
This is not the first time the Tool frontman has openly praised the folk icon. During an early-career interview with MTV‘s Kurt Loder, he was asked about the music that shaped his youth. Maynard James Keenan quickly responded: “Joni Mitchell. I think everything Joni Mitchell did for music was big. I was really influenced by her.”
More recently, during an interview with YouTube personality Rick Beato, he placed her work directly alongside heavy metal royalty.
“The two albums that I can remember most going, these albums changed the way that I thought of music was Black Sabbath‘s first album, and Joni Mitchell Blue. I’ve listened to a million things over the years, but those were the ones that I kinda cut my teeth on,” he said.
Expanding on the lessons he learned from his aunt regarding the singer-songwriter’s career trajectory, Maynard previously told another interviewer about the specific uphill battles the folk artist faced.
“She was actually able to convey to me, here’s a person who’s a woman, who is writing her own songs, who is producing and mixing and releasing her own songs. And it’s a woman fighting this uphill struggle in arguably a man’s rock world. So that sunk in right away for me. Even as young as I was, that made sense, like, Oh, this is somebody who is going against the grain in a way.”
