You Must Have Been Out Your Mind

The Pot from TOOL's "10,000 Days" album is a monstrous song with gobs of tiny details worth listening to. Right at the start–0:00–there is a very faint "echo" of the first lyric before it comes in at 0:01. The "echo" is soft but clear as day on a good set of cans. I annoyingly use "echo" in quotations because the sound I'm talking about precedes the vocal. It's not an echo, reverb, or a backing vocal. And it's not a digital effect. So what is that cool/creepy sound, and where did it come from? Well, that's a good question with a fascinating answer. And those last two sentences are a spot-on summary of the TOOL experience. Let's get eyeball-deep in these muddy waters.

Where does the first soft "preceding echo" of vocals in The Pot come from? The song was recorded on tape, and the sound is print-through of the vocal, caused by the contact transfer of signal patterns from one layer of tape to another as it sits, wound concentrically, on a reel. Joe Barresi was the engineer on the record. In a 2016 interview with Louder for the album's ten-year anniversary, Barresi talks about that effect and some of the other crazy lengths he and the band went through to get the album sounding just so.

I'm so glad they did.

"10,000 Days" is a masterpiece of audio recording. The Pot is a standout track on an album full of ambitious big swings in songwriting, musicianship, production, and packaging. Those big swings all connect. This is a cold take, by the way. "10,000 Days" won a Grammy in 2006 for Best Recording Package. This seems kind of silly, but the packaging for this album was siiiiick. I took some pics of mine and posted them here on Threads. Vicarious, the first track, was nominated for the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance that same year.

Then in 2007 The Pot hit #1 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart. In 2008, The Pot was also nominated for the Best Hard Rock Performance Grammy. It did not win. The Pretender by The Foo Fighters beat it out. But in my heart, The Pot is 2008's best hard rock performance, and it's not close. Sorry-not-sorry, Foo Fighters.

TOOL will spoil you for amazing sounds coming out of your hi-fi gear. "10,000 Days" is immaculately produced with screaming guitars, punchy guttural bass lines, impossibly complex percussive rhythms, and vocals that remain equally powerful as they go from inviting and intimate to demonic screams. The only place my mileage varies is on TOOL's ambient interludes. They've always included these on their albums and the tracks are typically skips for me after a first listen. It's not like they're bad songs; they're ambient works. I'm just rarely in the mood unless I'm high out of my mind, which happened a lot 25 years ago. Today, not so much.

The Pot is a reference track for me. I know it well and use it to compare gear. I also like to listen and pick out a performance to focus on. There's so much to reward your attention it's worth listening to in this way. It helps that every little nuance of each instrument, vocal, and effect is well separated.

Alternatively, The Pot is a god-like hard rock performance for the ages. You can just turn up and vibe.

Details: Here are a few of my favorite things.

• The vocal print-through effect at 0:00 and 0:09
• Percussion comes in for the first time on the left at 0:16, slowly rotates to the center, and then back left
• After 100's of listens, I'm still kinda not over how hard the guitar riff kicks down the door when it finally arrives at 0:36
• The rolling bass line at 1:32 can punch you in the chest as hard as a kick drum if you have a good set of loudspeakers or subwoofers, and it's clear as day; there is no mud at all on this fast, super intense bass guitar riff
• Danny Carey's drum solo at 2:12 is sick, as is expected
• At 2:57, Maynard James Keenan delivers a typically pretentious AF Maynard lyric, "Now you're weeping shades of cozened indigo" (cozened means to trick or deceive)
• 4:20-5:07 poly-rhythm breakdown goes hard
• 5:57 - 10-second Maynard scream

At 6:15, the song ends on an unresolved up-beat. There will be no catharsis. TOOL's longtime shtick of hating their obsessed fans (embarrassing for me) and giving them almost what they want, but not quite, continues. The Pot is brilliant, spoiling us in detail from the songwriting to the literal package it came in. Look and listen closely, and you'll be handsomely rewarded, almost.

Data

Song: The Pot
Album: 10,000 Days
Artist: TOOL
Genre: Hard Rock, Metal, Prog Rock, Art Rock
Year: 2006
Length: 6:22
Composer: TOOL
Producer: TOOL
Engineer: Evil Joe Baressi

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