10,000 Days

Lore & Background

The title 10,000 Days is thought to refer to the orbital period of the planet Saturn (the actual time period is 10,759 days). According to singer Maynard James Keenan, the Saturn return is "the time in your twenty eighth, twenty ninth 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." Keenan expected that the songs composed would "chronicle that process, hoping that my gift back would be to share that path and hope that I could help somebody get past that spot." The title 10,000 Days additionally refers to the amount of time that Maynard's mother, Judith Marie Gridley, was paralyzed. The album was recorded at O'Henry Sound Studios in Burbank, as well as at The Loft and Grandmaster Studios in Hollywood, California. It was mixed at Bay 7 in North Hollywood, CA and mastered at Gateway Mastering Studios in Portland, Maine. Guitarist Adam Jones employed various recording techniques, including a "pipe bomb mic" (a guitar pickup mounted inside a brass cylinder), and a talk box guitar solo on the song "Jambi." Drummer Danny Carey operated many of the sound effects on the interlude tracks using electronic drums called Mandalas. 10,000 Days has a heavier sound than its predecessor, largely because of the influence of avant-garde metal band Fantômas, who toured with Tool before the writing process.

In Their Own Story

The compact disc packaging for 10,000 Days consists of a thick cardboard-bound booklet partly covered by a flap holding a pair of stereoscopic eyeglasses, which can be used to view a series of images inside. Viewed with the glasses, the artwork produces an illusion of depth and three-dimensionality. Alex Grey, who created a majority of the album art for Lateralus and its accompanying video "Parabola," reprised his role for 10,000 Days. The CD face itself is decorated with stylized eyes, arranged in a seemingly logarithmic spiral toward the center (adapted from a previous Alex Grey painting, "Collective Vision"). As with Tool's other albums, the lyrics are not printed within the artwork; vocalist Maynard James Keenan has instead released the lyrics online. On May 5, 2006, the band's official webmaster hinted that "the four individual photos [of the band members] can be used as the pieces of a kind of puzzle," but the puzzle and its meaning "will just be another nut to crack." In an interview, Alex Grey said that many of his artworks for Tool have been based on and influenced by the visionary journeys of a brew called ayahuasca. He described the 10,000 Days cover as "a blazing vision of an infinite grid of Godheads during an ayahuasca journey," and also talked about the Lateralus cover in a similar fashion. Grey stated in another interview when making the 10,000 Days cover that it depicts visions received during a DMT trip.

Reader's Guide

10,000 Days received generally favorable reviews, albeit with less enthusiasm than previous Tool albums. Most critics praised the album as another example of Tool's musicianship. Critics who gave 10,000 Days a relatively low score questioned the merits of its ambient interludes, which Tool have also used on their previous releases. The album received a Grammy Award in 2006 for Best Recording Package. That same year, the song "Vicarious" was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance. In 2008, 10,000 Days garnered another Grammy nomination when "The Pot" was nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance. At Metacritic, the album received an average score of 68, based on 19 reviews. Rob Theakston of AllMusic wrote: "It's not only a step forward for the band, but a re-embracing of the epic-length rock songs found at the roots of early heavy metal." Nick Cowen of Drowned in Sound described it as "probably the most engagingly brilliant heavy metal album that'll be released on a major label all year." Alternative Press magazine wrote: "As with everything in Tool's oeuvre, 10,000 Days packs enough beauty, heartache and triumph that it will be dissected, studied and envied by younger bands for years to come." Evan Serpick of Rolling Stone stated that on the album, the band "maintains a level of craftsmanship and virtuosity unparalleled in metal." Rolling Stone magazine ranked the album as the 38th Best Album of 2006. The album won a 2006 Metal Storm Award for Best Alternative Metal Album.

Did You Know?

• The album title 10,000 Days refers both to the orbital period of Saturn (10,759 days) and the amount of time Maynard James Keenan's mother was paralyzed.
• The CD packaging includes a pair of stereoscopic eyeglasses to view 3D artwork by Alex Grey.
• Guitarist Adam Jones used a 'pipe bomb mic' (a guitar pickup inside a brass cylinder) and a talk box on the song 'Jambi'.
• The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 564,000 copies.
• 10,000 Days was Tool's last release for more than a decade; their next studio album, Fear Inoculum, was released on August 30, 2019.