The ever-busy Maynard James Keenan, upon taking a fifth job as a bi-weekly writer for the Phoenix New Times, described his reasons behind creating his third band, Puscifer.

As reported by Antiquiet, although Keenan is already frontman for A Perfect Circle and Tool and owns his own vineyard, the go-getter is starting up a third musical project in the form of the band Puscifer. Keenan has also recently taken a position writing for the Phoenix New Times biweekly, which gave him the perfect opportunity to explain what Puscifer is all about. In his article, Keenan discusses mortality and what it’s like to first realize that one day each of our lives will eventually come to an end. He then went on to explain that because of this realization, people recognized that we have to make something of our lives beyond just surviving. Based off of this, Keenan emphasizes the importance of creative energy and strives to bring that to light through Puscifer.

We were now aware that our very survival was directly connected to and contingent upon how creative we could be

Keenan also explained that in our realization that we were mortal, we realized how easily our lives could be taken from us by the many powerful forces around us. Because we weren’t the strongest, fastest, or largest animals on the planet we had to be inventive in our survival and use our creativity to outwit the more powerful beasts.

Instead, we needed to use every fiber of our imagination, every spark of our creative energy to stay ahead of these daily threats on our lives.

Most importantly, Keenan revealed three cornerstones of the purpose behind the band. First, is an attempt to stabilize a lost balance between the artistic and utilitarian. Second, is a hope to inspire the hidden story teller in us all and motivate people to bring life to all we observe. His third and final motivation is simply to remind people to dance a little before the inevitable and ever-approaching end.

Because we at Puscifer feel that Life is too short not to create something with every breath we draw

Keenan is certainly taking his own advice. The man is constantly creating, whether it is music with one of  his three bands, wine in his vineyard, or insightful articles, the artist has not wasted a moment. In this earlier mxdwn article, you can watch Keenan in his natural element, performing and creating music with a band from his earlier career, Childen of the Anachronistic Dynasty. This song, titled “Sober”, ended up being a song for his current band Tool.