Tool [ tickets ]/A Perfect Circle [ tickets ]/Puscifer [ tickets ] frontman Maynard James Keenan [ tickets ] is planning for his future by running the Page Springs Vineyards and Cellars in Cornville, AZ. But don't call it a side project. "It's not a side project," Keenan said during an interview with LiveDaily. "This is my future. I'm not The Rolling Stones. I'm not going to tour forever. It's my legacy."Keenan built his "legacy" with keen observations while touring the world with his bands. ("That's what artists do," he said matter of factly.) As a result, he and partner Eric Glomski started the wine company in Arizona."I have pretty good intuition having seen the soils here," said Keenan, who has lived in Arizona since 1995. "Having been around the world seeing other places, it made sense to put vines in here." Page Springs wine isn't the only project that Keenan is pushing. A collection of artists have reinterpreted Puscifer's music for the remix album "'V' is for Viagra--The Remixes," an offshoot of 2007's "'V' is for Vagina."Keenan talked to LiveDaily about his musical projects, specifically Puscifer, as well as the status of A Perfect Circle and Tool, and whether or not he will tour with Puscifer.LiveDaily: How did the remix album come together?Keenan: I put feelers out to see who's available. That's part of the charm of Puscifer: the randomness and random availability of friends who are around doing stuff. Part of the joy of the album is hearing how people interpreted your material.It's definitely inspiring to basically have a core of ideas. A lot of bands get caught up in the whole solidarity--the "us against the world" kind of mentality where there's a complete disconnect between who they are and who the rest of the world is. "You can't touch me. We're this solid entity, untouchable." I think it's kind of limiting. With something like this, it can spiral off in infinite directions. It can inspire far more of a community-based experience, kind of like when the old jazz guys used to travel around the country playing with different players. They're the same thing. Are you going to tour in support of Puscifer?Someday. Someday? Not anytime soon?Probably next year. Then it's not really going to be a tour. It'll be more of a cabaret, an installation in one town for four or five nights. Once again, with different players each night. That way it's fun. It's fresh. More people get to be involved. It's noncommittal, so you don't have to be too precious about it. You can just really have fun and be in the moment with it. It seems like it's a completely different animal than Tool or A Perfect Circle.Yeah, absolutely. I can take pieces of it back to those projects, whatever I learn here. How do you know, when you write material, which band it's going to go toward?We all write together, depending on where it's going to be. I write lyrics on my own, but generally speaking, we come up with the music first. Always music first, except there's some songs with Puscifer that I've kind of explored key lines first and build rhythms around them. Mostly with Puscifer, it's kind of a rhythm-based project to begin with. That way, if the melody's relatively secondary, that allows other people--other remixers, or other people who interpret the music--to give them a lot more free range. What is the status of Tool and A Perfect Circle.I don't know. We're working on Puscifer right now. How long are you going to be working on Puscifer?Hard to say. Those other projects are always in the works. There's always something going on. So nothing's changed. Just as before, every time I go out with Perfect Circle, people ask me what's going on with Tool. I go back to Tool, people ask me what's going on with Perfect Circle. They're still alive. Are you working on new material for Puscifer?Always. It's a constantly evolving project. There's going to be constant stuff coming from it. But there's no tour. I'm kind of off the road. I've been touring too much. I'm concentrating on the vineyard for the moment. When do you expect the new Puscifer album to come out?Um, hard to say. I might not even do albums. It might be track by track. A couple at a time, here and there. I read that you are also into stand-up comedy. Any desire to revisit that?I did a lot of sketch comedy back in the '90s, yeah. I'm, like, pushing the envelope on the comedy with everything we do. There's comical elements in all of my projects. I haven't really left it. I've been doing it. I think the remixes really showcase that.Yeah, totally. I have a lot of friends who definitely get it. So they kind of took it to another level. Were you surprised with some of the renditions that came in?Some of them, very. With others, it was pretty much what I was hoping for. How many tracks did you do before you decided on the ones that landed on the album? That was it. That was all of them. There were a couple tracks that we didn't put on the album because they were slotted to go other places. In hindsight, I think it was probably smart. We kind of struggled with it a little bit initially. Will those other tracks see the light of day?They're already out there. There's extra tracks on a "'V' is for Vagina" deluxe iTunes version. There's an additional four tracks. A deluxe version comes with artwork, the video for "Queen B." A bunch of the tracks showed up there and on the 12" vinyl version of the original version.
