The climax provides a barrage of imagery and revelations: a figure attached to a wall behind a translucent screen, a sentry of sorts wielding a mobile, robotic cannon and an organic substance flowing through a pipe found in the house.
While experiencing these effects, the figure ventures through his living quarters and its many corridors. Its contents are kept hidden for the majority of the video's duration, but it seems whatever it is has had adverse mind altering effects – there are repeated shots of the humanoid levitating in his chair, and his head and arm vibrating wildly. He happens to stumble upon a wooden box, which he opens near the beginning.
The video's protagonist is a small, humanoid being, who lives and sleeps in an abandoned mansion, in a rusty room sparsely decorated with a table, a chair, and a bed with no mattress and a curtain as a blanket. A live-action clay figure is shown twitching and vibrating violently. Whereas all four band members could be seen at all times during the previous clip, "Sober" shows only brief flashes of them. It was the first of Tool's videos to be made in stop motion, the earlier promo video for " Hush" being live action. It was filmed using stop-motion animation, with the characters' models designed by Adam Jones. It debuted in May of that same year and was directed by Fred Stuhr. And then people use those transitions as a crutch and they don't ever really come back from them.Screenshot of the Sober music video depicting the humanoid being.Ī video for "Sober" was made in 1993. When you're a kid who just drops a tab of acid, if you have no frame of reference for the experience, it's kind of like spiritual theft in a way because you're not really coming back with anything to share. "I think that time most of those people took to do those things, you're kind of preparing yourself in a way so what you actually see you understand on some level. trying to open up your Kundalini, this intense years of training, and all of the sudden, people come along with LSD and bypass the whole discipline process," Keenan added. "There's the whole idea behind the discipline of meditation or shamanistic rituals that has to do with getting to those spaces where you actually step out of your own body and you have other experiences. "That song Maynard kind of went with the side, or the people who interpret drug influences the wrong way," Jones told BBC Radio in 2006. But Keenan actually designed the explosive, acerbic "The Pot" as a critique on frivolous drug use. 10,000 Days, like most of Tool's music, feels like a perfect acid trip soundtrack. "She was paralyzed very early on from an aneurysm, and it just strengthened her faith, which is fine, because she didn't really have anything else but her faith."ħ. "The song itself is called 'Judith,' which is my mother's name," he said. While Keenan has rarely cited his mother as the song's direct inspiration, he did mention her in the "Judith" music video commentary from A Perfect Circle's 2004 CD-DVD set, aMOTION. On the chorus, he intones, "It was you who prayed for me/So what have I done to be a son to an angel?" "A passionate spirit/Uncompromised/Boundless and open/A light in your eyes, then immobilized," he sings over a psychedelic guitar drone. On the the two-part epic "Wings for Marie," the frontman seems to reference his mother, a devout Christian, and the pain of watching her suffer. 2)Ī more pervasive - and poignant - theory is that "10,000 Days" nods to the length of time between Maynard James Keenan's mother being paralyzed from an aneurysm and stroke and her death three years before the album's release. For me, starting to recognize those patterns, it was very important to start constructing songs that chronicled that process, hoping that my gift back would be to share that path and hope that I could help somebody get past that spot." Kurt Cobain didn't quite make it past his Saturn Return.
Hendrix didn't, Janis Joplin didn't, John Bonham. "It's kind of the story of Noah, and the belly of the whale. "That's the time in your 28th, 29th year when you are presented the opportunity to transform from whatever your hang-ups were before to let the light of knowledge and experience lighten your load, so to speak, and let go of old patterns and embrace a new life," he said. In an interview with writer Jon Wiederhorn, Keenan pegged the title to the astrological and philosophical notion of the "Saturn return," a reference to the planet's orbit around the sun. But multiple theories persist as to the real meaning. No, the album title isn't some kind of future-snark prediction about how long it would take Tool to follow up their upcoming fifth LP.