I love music. I have loved music since I was a child. As I grew up, I leaned more toward the genre of Rock.

I wasn't an angry kid or anything, I just loved the pure emotion that was released in the songs. It's the same feeling that many of you get when a Bach piece reaches it's climax.

But, there was a generic sound to rock. Usually a 4/4 time signature, open hi-hats, thrashing guitar, " screaming vocals.

My brother, Ricky bought me an album that had a awesome cover on it. It was a picture of a smokebox set behind a linear case so that when you moved it, the image behind it seemed to come to life. It was from a band called Tool.

Tool is no ordinary band, as I look forward to showing you below. Tool truly makes music, not noise, music. Awkward time signatures and epic musical numbers fill their albums, which usually get released about 5 years apart from each other. Beyond the music, they fill the inside of their album cases with strange yet beautiful artwork that may or may not be intended to offend, confuse, or otherwise amuse you. Their most recent release (10,000 Days) came in a package that had built-in stereoscopic lenses that you could use to look at the interior artwork to make it appear 3D.

Now jumping forward nearly 10 years, I am still an avid Tool fan. Today, I will show you how much thought goes into Tool's music.

Anyone here familiar with the Fibonacci sequence? I'm terrible with math so I didn't understand it until I read about it.
The sequence runs like this: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 etc.

The first number of the sequence is 0, the second number is 1, and each subsequent number is equal to the sum of the previous two numbers of the sequence itself.

Using this sequence, you can graph a Fibonacci spiral which looks like the image below:


Ok, back to Tool. When this song was being written, Justin Chancellor (bass) starts the song with 3 time signatures, 9/8, 8/8, then 7/8, all in succession where it falls in on itself, like a spiral. Now, whats the significance of this? A bar of 9, 8, 7 = 987. 987 is the 16th number in the Fibonacci sequence. The timing actually corresponds with one of the numbers in the Fibonacci sequence.

Maynard James Keenan (vocal) was on tour with another band at this time by the name of A Perfect Circle. While on tour, he was writing lyrics to this song.
They read:
...to swing on the spiral...
...we'll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no one's been.
Spiral out. Keep going.

So now we're getting somewhere. We have timing based on the Fibonacci sequence and lyrics that hint at the Fibonacci spiral.

Now, the kicker. The verse to the song is in a very special manner.
Remember how I said that the Fibonacci sequence was 1,1,2,3,5,8,13?

Play the song, listen to how the verse is composed:
1 - Black
1 - then
2 - white are
3 - all I see
5 - in my infancy.
8 - red and yellow then came to be,
5 - reaching out to me.
3 - lets me see.
13- As below, so above and beyond, I imagine
8 - drawn b-yond the lines of reason.
5 - Push the envelope.
3 - Watch it bend.

Notice the numbers next to the lyrics? That number represents the number of syllables in that line. They all follows the Fibonacci sequence, whether it be up or down.

Could all of this been a coincidence? Maybe to start with. But by the time they were done, they had one of their most popular songs that audibly followed a sequence that originated from Mother Nature herself.

So, take a moment to "embrace your desire to feel the rhythm, to feel connected enough to step aside and weep like a widow, to feel inspired, to fathom the power, to witness the beauty, to bathe in the fountain, to swing on the spiral of our divinity and still be a human."
-Maynard James Keenan

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