There’s an excellent interview with Danny on Aussie site Faster Louder this morning. He talks about preparations for the tour and touches on the new album as well:
What can we expect from this Tool show that differs from the band’s previous Big Day Out appearance in 2007?
Definitely different lighting features, props and visual delights I guess! Not a lot of new music but we’ll try to mix it up as much as we can, maybe pull out a few oldies that people may not have heard in quite a while. Maybe give a few hints of some things that we’ve been working on in between songs. Who knows. Maybe by then we may even have a couple of new songs to play. We’re working on them daily so it kind of depends on how far along we get.There definitely will be big visual surprises. It won’t be what you saw last time. There’ll be some of the similar elements in certain songs that we’re happy with how they’ve developed visually.
Also interesting is the possibility of digital releases:
The music industry has seen a lot of changes in recent times, with the continued decline in album sales and the increase in both legal and illegal downloads. How will Tool attack the digital market/world or will you just stick to the conventional CD release?
It’s kind of tough. The thing that we sort of disappointed about is that the way it’s all set up is that it’s catering to short attention spans rather than selling albums, they’d [the record companies] would rather sell a single or a lot of the time, butchered down versions of singles. It’s a sad situation because we’ve always put a big importance on buying albums as a single piece of art. We attempt to present our albums as albums and we’re actually negotiating with our record company and different people to release our stuff in the digital format. We wanted to make a point that the digital downloads can be available at the highest quality that technology will allow, even doing it at a higher level than any of our CDs. That is a positive side of the whole technological advancement in music.
While I understand the desire to release albums in the format of their choice, it’s good to see that they aren’t turning their back on the digital world completely!
Thanks to Jimmy666 for tip!