Maynard James Keenan is the star of the latest edition of Amoeba Records' popular What's In My Bag? series on YouTube, and alongside paying his respects to influential rock artists - Minor Threat, Sonic Youth, Swans, Devo - Tool's frontman also shares his love for legendary folk-rock singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell.
"My aunt turned me on to Joni Mitchell," Keenan says. "This is a person who... you kind of dismiss her back in the day as just being this cutesy folk singer with her acoustic guitar, pretty with a big smile, and she was far beyond that. She was writing her own music. All of it. All of those early albums. She was also engineering and producing her own music. So, start to finish, Joni Mitchell wrote her own songs, recorded her own songs, performed her own songs as a solo artist."
Keenan goes on to call Mitchell a "huge influence".
"She would tune her guitar to whatever mood she was in and write the song from that tuning," he cobtinues. "So there's a lot of songs, allegedly, she can't remember how to play because she can't remember the tuning."
This is far from the first time that Keenan has talked up Mitchell as a key influence on his musical journey.
