(NB – Any missing links to tracks can be found at the bottom)
Part 1 – Hellfest 2019
I’ve written at length about my musical tastes previously, and the journey that made me into the sort of music fan I am today, but in 2019 two things happened which profoundly affected how I emotionally interact with music.
Previously I have used music to try and match and express my mood, and indeed continue to do so. I would experience frisson on occasion (Dreams by Fleetwood Mac takes me back to Upper Sixth every time I hear it), when the mood and music matched particularly well, but often it was that feeling in my heart and head, the beating of those heavy drums, which moved my heavy metal heart, and inevitably the headbanging would start. Not that I exclusively listen to rock and metal, on the contrary I enjoy all sorts – everything from country, to classical, to cheesy 80s pop. Life is too short for elitist and tribal opinion over music. It’s good to try and experience lots of different things, not just in music, but in life. No matter the genre I played, no matter how well it fit my mood, it was very rare that it was a perfect match – mind and soul swaying to the notes and rhythm in the air and mind. I thought this to be normal, and I presume most of you reading would agree with that notion.
The first thing that happened was at the end of 2019 Hellfest – where music, life and hedonism perform satanic rituals at the gates of hell. This edition was a four day festival, with Slipknot, Manowar (later replaced by Sabaton due to disagreements with the festival organisers), Kiss, and Tool the headliners. French festivals are not like English festivals, where there are clear camping areas, and the music needs to stop playing at 11pm so local middle aged people can get their full 8 hours. The very last band (after even the headliner) often doesn’t start until 2am. The first time I went in 2014 we were basically camped in the porch of another tent, my friend sliced his ankle badly on chicken wire walking into an opposite vineyard for a 4am piss, and I went to bed at 3am Monday morning… to wake up at 6.30am to start packing up and begin the long drive home. We had arrived quite late and we basically got the last bit of green (or brown scorched earth) available to tent on. Anyone who arrived later basically just camped on whatever was green in the nearby town. If the locals cared, they didn’t bother the police. 5 years later, what was a relatively cheap experience compared to British festivals was now a bit more expensive thanks to a change in foreign policy, but the stars had aligned with the lineup and friends schedules, so we made plans and drove to Nantes. Even though we got there in good time this time, we camped in almost exactly the same spot as 5 years ago, later finding out that many of the Hellfest attendees spend a few days prior to the festival camping in the local area prior to the site opening (I can only assume illegally).
Those of you who have festivalled before know that the last headline act on a Sunday can be a bit of a slog. Sleep deprivation from days of drink, drugs, and partying take the toll even on the young. I had driven for about 10 hours to get there and had four days of partying, late nights… oh yeah, France in June can get hot. My friends who hadn’t been before had had visions of Download (or Brownload as it’s often nicknamed, due to the early June fixture in the northern Midlands often leading to a mild British spring-like weather – aka drowning in mud), and bought long sleeved shirts and jeans… nope shorts and t-shirts, water bottles were the order of the day. I had a baseball cap I would soak in water just to regulate my temperature. If you wanted to mosh, mud wouldn’t greet you if you tripped, but hard cracked earth, and mini tornadoes of dirt would swirl from the pit across the arena, a metal butterfly effect which led to bandanas across the mouth and nose being common (how prophetic for 2020). The French seemed to revel in these conditions though, I saw someone dress up in a onesie lobster outfit and mosh very hard during Clutch. Or a woman in nothing but her knickers and a dog collar being led by her (?)boyfriend around the arena, which sparked a discussion about whether they make sunscreen for nipples… There was more than naked women and lobsters roasting in the French sun though. There were art installations everywhere, and each festival has a theme, and there are areas of shade set away from the main stages. Naps during lulls on the schedule were a must here (or in front of the first aid queue like I managed as Dream Theater sent me to sleep).
Despite the revelries, my greater point is we were all tired come Sunday evening, and the headliners that day, Tool, were starting at 1.35am Monday morning. For those who are unaware, Tool are a progressive art rock/metal band, who had not released an album at that point for almost 13 years, but it had just been announced that the latest album would be released in August this year – an exciting time to see them live! The thing about progressive music is that familiarity helps build meaning and emotional connection with the music, so debuting new songs live should probably be done after the album had been released, right?… Two new songs back to back later, both over 10 minutes long, performed to a very tired audience with no familiarity, we were a bit nonplussed. To compound matters, we were on stationed behind a bit of a dip which was messing with the bass frequency, otherwise we would have happily sat and enjoyed the performance… because the visuals were essentially one with the music being performed, and were hypnotic. I was mesmerised by the singer’s chilling vocals, traumatised during Parabol/Parabola as we watched the friendly alien on screen get dissected, enthralled by the ruthless ‘tick’ in Vicarious. I cheered as the iconic bassline from Schism played…
But I had done what I usually did when I was seeing a famous band live for the first time, and not listened to the music (also see Rammstein at Download in 2013…). I mean I had in like 2014 listened to all of Tool’s albums at least once, generally enjoyed them, but nothing had stuck 5 years later. Remember when I said that earlier in the paragraph that familiarity with the music was a must? Well, most of us agreed that though the performance was amazing, the music and set was a bit average. However, when I got home and recovered, the music had actually stuck with me enough that I made an effort to listen to the music, then bought some albums, looked up the setlist and re-listened to it… and I re-listened and re-listened and re-listened. They were stuck in my head.
Then the second thing happened. In autumn 2019, my dog died.
Part 2 – Definition: Tool– a device or implement used to carry out a particular function.
PomPom was never my dog, but she was our dog. On 3rd September 2005, she came from her litter to join the family home as a present for my sister (despite it being the day before my 15th birthday). PomPom was supposedly of the Pomeranian breed but as she grew it was clear that she was not of breed standard, but she was healthy for it, and most importantly happy. Excitable, cheeky, jealous, she was the yapping heart and soul of the Thiedeman household, adding a unique voice to our familial chorus for many years.
The years turned by, circ*mstances change, and PomPom ended up living up north with my mother. I knew she was getting sicker, and I’ll spare you the details, but one evening I got a phone call and was told that she had gone.
I was 29 at the time, in my first relationship in a long time. I had also lost two dogs previously as an adult, so as PomPom got sicker I tensed up and emotionally prepared myself. But it hurt just as much, I seemed to have missed the memo on that when our second dog died. And I didn’t know why. I still don’t know why. My girlfriend at the time wasn’t too sympathetic beyond the initial sniffling phone call I made to her (despite her having her own aging dog). I had a job which though I was very capable at, I was kind of rotting in – I wasn’t just stuck in a rut, I was buried at the bottom of a ravine, my self-worth inconceivable, bolted to my back, the weightless thing breaking the rules and weighing the world. In private I would cry on occasion. But I kept telling myself that PomPom was an old dog, that she had lived a long and happy life, but it didn’t really help. I know that grief isn’t a competition, and I knew that then too, but it didn’t stop me trying to bottle all those feelings up – it’s something that I’ve done as far as I can remember, as natural to me as water flowing down a hill.
I was still listening to Tool during this period, becoming more and more familiar with their discography, thoroughly enjoying their new album ‘Fear Inoculum’, but one song from an older album caught my attention. It had been on the setlist for Hellfest 2019, and I hadn’t remembered it from my initial visit to the world of Tool, and nor can I remember the Hellfest performance, but now it was resonating with me more and more. That song was Jambi, the second track on their fourth album, ‘10,000 Days’.
Let’s talk about Tool. If we are to extend the above definition to the band, the music of Tool is used to carry out a function to the listener. And it seemed that function was for me to process emotions, to apply the themes and imagery from a song onto my own experiences, and travel together as one to have an almost transcendent experience. Also, if someone were to call you a tool you would likely be offended, and the band sort of owned this when they were founded, a literal intrusive thought as you listened to their music, with a lot of phallic imagery in the early days of the band, but it contributed some humour and levity to the perverse and dark atmosphere they created. As a band, they emerged parallel to the grunge scene in the late 80s alongside the likes of Tom Morello (of Rage Against the Machine) and Green Jellÿ. Their early music definitely had a grunge feel, but it was also definitely separate from the likes of Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains. A bit heavier, a bit more experimental in the writing. After dropping their original bassist Paul D’Amour (now of Fear Factory) for English bassist Justin Chancellor (originally of English progressive rock band Peach – check out You Lied), they released their second album Ænima, followed 5 years later by Lateralus, shifting to almost a progressive grunge style of music over those two albums, and adding to the darkness a sense of transhumanism and galactic scope, an examination of the macro and micro of the human condition as a process of the universe. They cemented themselves as cult favourites for metal and psychedelic drug purists alike, and music critics loved them.
Back to Jambi. This song resonated with me strongly, and it continues to resonate with me as much to this day despite countless listens on Spotify and the album CD. My heart, my soul, my thoughts and emotions moved as one as the dark notes are thrashed out by the guitarist, the singer solemnly screaming and begging at some uncaring higher power. But to understand, we need to look at the context this song and the album ‘10,000 Days’ was written; I need to talk about the band’s singer and lyricist, who this song and album is centred on.
(Please note that though I have researched below, the below details may not be 100% accurate as some of this is not from direct sources).
Maynard James Keenan, the singer of Tool, had a difficult and traumatic childhood. His parents divorced when he was a child, and his father moved from the mid-West to California, but Keenan and his mother remained, and she re-married. His step-father is alleged to have sexually abused Keenan (which is recorded in horrific detail in the songs Prison Sex, and Jimmy), something which, from Keenan’s perspective, his mother was aware of and enabled. When he was 12, his mother (who was only in her mid-30s) had a life changing and debilitating stroke. This led to Keenan moving to live with his father in California, where his life significantly improved. He would as a young man meet future Tool drummer Danny Carey, and then later on the guitarist Adam Jones, as well as the original bassist of Tool.
Tool soon found musical success and cult stardom, and he was able to live as a rockstar. If you were to look at a video of a live performance from the 21st century, Keenan is very rarely at the front of the stage like almost every rock singer ever. He is often found to the side of the stage, sometimes behind a screen to produce a shadow (which he sometimes has fun with this and creates shadow shapes). However in early live performances, such as of their first smash hit, Sober at Reading 1993, he is front and centre. He is hunched over, his face fixed in shape, he has a bizarre mohawk, his plain t-shirt hanging loosely off his skinny frame. Maybe it is partially performance, but Keenan appears very anxious, and makes the rendition of this song all the more disturbing; Sober is a hauntingly lucid song about a friend who achieved sobriety, but sadly and possibly as a consequence, lost all musical inspiration and talent, ruining his life. From Keenan’s traumatic past and the way he cultivates his image (not typical of the rest of the band at all), he has managed to create a level of mystique around him rivalling some of the rock gods of yesteryear.
There are likely many details known that I have missed, and many nuances which will only be known to Keenan and his close friends and family, which he keeps quite private. We do know that by the time of Ænima’s release, he had had a son (the song H. is a tribute to him, where Keenan professes feeling at peace with the universe despite all of his internal worries and tribulations, because of H’s presence in his life), and he has more recently had a daughter with a different partner. He is a black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He is also the singer of two other very successful rock bands – A Perfect Circle, and Puscifier. Maybe he has found some healing and solace after his difficult childhood.
Just over 27 years after her life changing stroke, or exactly 10,000 days later, Keenan’s mother died.
The album ‘10,000 Days‘ as a whole I believe is about the cycle of life and death. The opening track Vicarious is a critical view of how his mother vicariously lives her life through her rockstar son, whilst she stares at the TV ‘like a zombie,’ and his response is essentially ‘better you than me.’ Wings for Marie (his mother’s name) and 10,000 days are tributes to his mother. The Pot is at the hypocrisy in drug use between parents and child (your parents probably did drugs at some point, kids)! Lipan Conjuring is a brief interlude, sounding almost like a shaman ritual funeral dirge. Rosetta Stoned is an 11 minute tour de force bourn of the band jamming, and the lyrics depict someone having a brain death whilst on acid, believing they were visited by aliens but were unable to remember the important message passed to them, and the individual being hyper-critical of themselves whilst being unable to communicate with the doctors trying to help him. Right in Two is a beautifully arranged song with a much softer tone than most of Tool’s discography, about trying to justify two things to be in line when life isn’t that simple, from the point of view of an angel who can see the right way for a mortal to take, yet mourning the mortal plight. Viginti Tres is like a cosmic other-worldly soundscape (Carey the drummer loves writing stuff like this), sounding almost like a death rattle, before (on the CD version at least) turning right back to the opening track Vicarious; the cycle of life and death continues. Denial, Anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, in much more nuanced and complicated terms.
I of course skipped over Jambi, the second track on the album. The name Jambi comes from the genie in the 80s PeeWee Herman TV show, which was allegedly for kids. It may be Tool’s heaviest song, but this is not what draws me to it. The song opens furiously, the guitar almost non-sensical in tone and rhythm, drums and bass hammering in tandem, but it abruptly stops, the guitar still ticking over in the background. Keenan then sings about how he has everything he wants, that he ‘feasts like a sultan’, able to satiate any desire he has. The guitar picks up a little more tunefully, and then there is a break, for the bass to come in with an unusual high pitch effect. Normally in Tool’s music, the bass is most prominent in the mix, and the guitar more atmospheric, but they have appeared to have switched in this song – the world is not what it is meant to be. The time signatures is also unusual, switching between 9/8 and 6/4, but Tool fans will tell you that this is nothing unusual, and weird time signatures are generally a feature of their music.
(I must admit before the English Literature GCSE section progresses, that I know next to nothing about music – I can play a few chords on guitar, and my singing is so average it’d be better if it was bad. Describing how my interpretation of the music and lyrics makes me feel is my aim).
Keenan then says he would give it all up if he thought he’d ‘lose you for just one day’. He goes on to talk about dabbling with the devil, how he was struggling, but how someone saved him, and how he feels he could now wish it all away. He talks of praying like a martyr all day, in public and with his position, and then at private during the night he begs ‘like a hooker’ (this is not the first time Keenan has compared himself to a prostitute in his lyrics). He says that he ‘tempted the devil with my song; and got what I wanted all along’ – telling us that he had spoken ill of his mother, with his music or at least in his chatter, and now he was getting what he truly wished for. The dark twist of this is the query of whether he was wishing for his mother’s pain to end after her stroke, or was he wishing darkness on her because of how she enabled his abuse?
The guitar, bass and drums all angrily bubble up and down, alternating with the singing, like someone trying to hold back tears, trying to hold it together, to continue. As the music builds towards the drop, Keenan now more desperately begs and wishes for everything to change. Finally the drop happens, and he delivers the lyrics with such sincerity that the crack in his voice was kept in the final recording:
So if I could I’d wish it all away
If I thought tomorrow would take you away
You’re my peace of mind, my all, my center
Just trying to hold on one more day
Damn my eyes (when sung sounds like ‘Djambaye-ayeees’)
Finally the song releases, and the furious guitar and drums and bass returns. This is followed by a talkbox solo, something not seen on any of their other songs (Tool in fact very rarely do guitar solos).
There is still about a quarter of the song to go (it’s progressive rock, a short song is like 6 minutes long), but I’ll pause the blow by blow account. Listening to this song over and over, and then reading into the background of this song and the album, I realised that Keenan was expressing his anger and grief at the lack of control he had when it came to his mother’s passing, all whilst alluding to his complicated past; the lyrics accompanying music, for my tastes, were beyond perfect. This build up of anger and trying to feel in control made me realise that I was actually extremely angry that I couldn’t say goodbye to PomPom, that I did not have that choice, in spite of all the preparations I had made previously from my prior experiences. It kind of shocked me when I realised that. Then when the music drops with the lyrics, as he tries to hold on just for one more day, I realised this song was also about letting go of the anger and control and letting yourself grieve, even if everything that happened before didn’t make sense, even if you had tried to join the gods through transcending musical tracks, even if you got to live the life of a rockstar, you would gamble with a genie (a lesser god, not some omniescent and omnipotent beings that Tool allude to in other tracks on albums such as ‘Lateralus’), and you would still lose. You just need that emotional break for yourself, a moment of vulnerability, and that it’s okay to be vulnerable. In fact it’s more than okay, it’s human.
And this realisation made me cry. And cry. And cry. Every time I came to this part of the song I would have the same epiphany and realisation reheard that part of it would make me cry even if I had been feeling perfectly normal before the song started. Jambi could always take me back to that point of emotional vulnerability of losing a loved one, just where Keenan had been in the genesis of writing this song and album.
The crying went on for almost a year, and still happens occasionally. The other day I was driving to my dad’s with my girlfriend a few months ago and this track came on, she thought I was listening to just more heavy metal, but then a few minutes in I burst out crying, and she was in shock that something that sounded like this could make someone feel like this, and I had to briefly explain why it was making me explain this whilst crying and trying to navigate the A1.
Jambi made me realise that I would do unspeakable things to have PomPom back with me, with my family. I realised how much peace and joy her presence brought me. Maybe I would have come to this realisation without Jambi, but maybe not. A song had never made me feel like this, had such a powerful hold over my emotions. Jambi was the tool to help me process losing PomPom.
The final quarter of the song, after the solo, is Keenan singing more freely, still with sorrow, but in this moment he has let go of his anger, embracing his grief. Almost religiously, he praises the ‘benevolent sun’ to ‘shine on forever’, and to ‘shine down upon the broken… until the two become one.’ Tool songs often involve cosmic concepts or ask the listener to think beyond the material plane… but this verse I think echoes to how all material in the universe eventually breaks down and returns to the stars. Two becoming one is alluding to returning to his mother – they were one once when she was pregnant, and one day they will become one again in the cosmos, until then all he needs her to do is shine, without her he’ll ‘wither away.’ The song has a final execution of that unusually high bass pitch before the song ramps into an angry crescendo, Keenan chooses anger and rejects the ‘poison’ of others, forging his own way forward, and the song ends in an exasperated gasp. Keenan has given up on Jambi, but he’s rejected the fickle genie too. You may have your time to grieve, but you still need to find your way to manage and move forward once you allow your moment of vulnerability to end. I hope I don’t follow Keenan’s path when I grieve in the future.
(Note: In writing this, I’ve noted there are a lot of themes associated with a God, god, gods, a higher power, or sentient power beyond full mortal conception and understanding. Though I identify as atheist, I’m not sure the members of Tool do. However, I do know that they use these themes to add to the mystique in their music and performances. They are universal themes through human history, something that humanity for almost all of it’s history have utilised at moments of emotional extremes. As a band they have researched and may subscribe to Eastern concepts of the metaphysical, and this is accompanied well in some of the parts of their songs being written in a more Eastern style – though I do not understand this in any kind of detail! Tool use this in their music, including Jambi, and as such I have talked about when understanding why Jambi resonates with me. I guess it helps me to contextualise the grief Keenan went through when making this song).
Part 3: I Can Taste the Music… Tastes Like Marmite
What is particularly heart-breaking about this song is how difficult a relationship Keenan had with his mother, and how he was suddenly forced to face this knot of emotions tangled in his past after essentially being on top of the world. Yet he expresses his anger and grief beautifully, lyrically cryptic but emotionally direct, and I think that is part of the sorrow I experience when I listen to this song, not just about who I’ve lost, but also who I’ve yet to lose, the losses yet unknown to me. But it also makes me contemplate about how in a metaphysical sense I am one with the universe, and that includes everyone that I have lost. A somewhat comforting thought.
Humans have a wide range of emotions, and society can often lead us to shun certain emotions as unhealthy or bad – Tool has made me realise that actually the thing that you need mentally, emotionally, will bring out the right emotions for you at the right time. Therefore, Jambi has to be my favourite song ever. No song has ever been able to reach beyond my soul, but to the very thing that tethers my being to reality, and make me feel like this. How it captured my emotions so perfectly in that moment in my life and gave me a way to vent them, it has to be my favourite, it’s just seems the logical conclusion.
I did eventually move past listening to Tool constantly, but it took some months, and even then my thoughts would turn not just to Jambi, but Tool songs and albums. I would say they’ve unbelievably managed to usurp Led Zeppelin and become my favourite band ever. Jambi probably isn’t their best written song, and if you were to ask other die-hard Tool fans they would probably rate it top 20 but not top 10 – and for a band with only about 50 songs, that this song makes me so passionately and strongly, I think it is a testament to the band’s skill at composing music. It’s worth noting that other Tool songs have made me feel certain ways, much more powerfully than a lot of other bands and songs have. When a band can reach inside you and make your soul rattle, when you dream about seeing them or listening to them, then they have to be the best. But none of their songs have that connection like has been forged with Jambi.
(I’ll leave a list at the bottom for what I think are Tool’s ‘best of’, but really they should be listened to in order in album form).
I of course tried to spread the word about Tool – I would try and succinctly talk with my friends about the emotional epiphany I had (maybe not quite as openly as written here), and how Jambi had unlocked that, and of their other amazing songs… but rather than a preacher, I actually must have sounded like a false prophet, or like someone who has been told to explain in detail the concept of astrophysics in 90 seconds. I’ve since been able to take a step back and am able to move on knowing that most of my friends don’t care for Tool, or at least don’t really get it, and that’s fine – we all have our own tastes, it’s other factors which bonds us as friends.
Tool fans have been known to eulogise, and indeed having taken a step back I can see why Tool fans get such a bad rap. Tool belongs to such a niche genre – in fact I don’t think there is a band like them, and the songs can require repeated listens to come to your own understanding – Tool fans can be so eager to have one more person to share and discuss their transcendent experiences with, they probably just scare most people off with their intensity – which is what I essentially did to my friends. At least I’m at a point where I can laugh at some of the jokes that are made about Tool and their cult following (no smoke without fire and all that).
But the key thing I failed to realise when trying to explain my experience to my friends, that musical resonance with music is all about your understanding and experience of music. Music, whilst being such a precise art compared to say film, is so incredibly personal. One person may have a different understanding of a band, a song, a different experience in life. I personally, physically cringe whenever I hear Angels by Robbie Williams* for the fifth time at a karaoke, with the whole pub singing along, but for someone else that could have been their wedding song, or the last song they listened to with their husband before he died. I have to respect that. They don’t get Tool, I don’t get Robbie Williams. That’s fine.
*(I haven’t chosen this song out of thin air. Though Angels is in a more accessible format for the general public than Jambi, thus having more air time and being more popular (Angels has 10x the views of Jambi on Spotify), the songs are both essentially about similar things – grieving and talking with immortal beings).
What emotionally resonates with someone is subjective and down to their tastes and experiences; you can wish to share that as much as you want, but certain experiences need to match for the song to click with them too. The fact that one song can make one person weep and another person cringe just speaks to the variety of the human condition and experiences. But that thousands of people can come together to see Tool or Robbie Williams, and sing along to songs that make them feel so strongly, shows that there is a collective understanding too. Taste, emotional resonance with art, collective enjoyment of these things, how open and inquisitive you are as a person, how mature you are on self-reflection, this and a million other things that I don’t know or understand, it is processed by your brain, then informs you how to react in the future to things you can experience, things you may or may not like, things you may or may not grow emotionally attached to. So much goes into developing taste, the fact there is common ground, the fact that similar experiences can vary in a nuanced way, is fascinating and almost out of our control, which feeds back into Tool’s concepts of processes happening on planes of reality that humanity can never truly understand. It’s so complicated that I have no hope of being able to sway people, but that is fine – I’ve essentially been trying to fight a law of the universe, of the human condition, when trying to explain why I like the tastes I do, and then be disappointed when most don’t share my view, no matter how eloquently I attempt to explain.
Trying to get people to not only understand my tastes, but also appreciate them on some sort of similar level that I do, is in hindsight a foolish endeavour. You share what you inspires you, and all you can do then is hope that it inspires them too. The complication of how taste works has taken me a long time to accept, and this battle of sharing taste and the following disappointment isn’t even new to me. Many anime fans, metal fans (me included for both) have faced this same battle. But as I’ve explained you can’t force someone to like something. Maybe I get overexcited when something inspires me so much, so the disappointment hurts even me, but I think that feeling is worth it. (Read the first part of my journey for a bit more detail on musical taste and acceptance).
Epilogue
I’m not sure why the tears continue, all these years later, but I am grateful for these tears, grateful for giving me the chance to feel and to understand and to process. Maybe I am projecting my past grievances onto a point I can mentally conceptualise and trigger, where I can be vulnerable, have previously been unable to express myself emotionally. I just wish everyone could have this opportunity to be able to channel feelings so strongly, whatever the emotion may be. Maybe you get a sense I am struggling to describe this feeling, despite all of the tries with various friends, despite writing 6000 odd words here – and that’s because I am struggling to explain. Jambi, that genie, may have some sort of spell over me… I’m sure you have a song that has a spell over you too.
Needless to say, after my profound experience with them, I have tickets to see Tool in the summer, where Keenan, Jones, Chancellor and Carey can all pluck on the fibres of my soul, live in concert. Though Jambi doesn’t appear to be on the setlist, I know who is with me in my heart and mind.
…
Sometimes, when I lean back and close my eyes, I can still sense PomPom with me. I can smell her scent, feel her fur, her curly excitable tail, her curious nose, her cheeky tongue lapping at my face and ears. I now know she has become one with the universe, and so one with me, and my family. PomPom is with her mother now and her litter, one day I will join her, and that gives me comfort.
Shine on forever, PomPom.
15 Tool Songs I Enjoy in no Particular Order Not Including Jambi (maybe you will enjoy them too)
Parabol / Parabola (Two separate tracks but listen to them back to back and you’ll why everyone includes them as the same track)
