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Adam Jones


Member

1988- Tool - guitar  

Guest musician

1998-2008 Melvins - guitar, bass guitar  
2009 Isis - guitars, keyboards  

Personal information

Born on: 15.01.1965

Adam's journey began in Libertyville, Illinois where, as a child, Adam began skipping Sunday school to read comics books at a nearby store. This rejection of the word of god in favor of the images of the comic microcosm carried over to school where Adam would draw pictures during teacher's lectures and think of music during math class. Adam studied violin as a child, but as Adam grew older he began to move away from the rigidity of a classical music and towards the sonic potentials of guitar playing.

While most kids were involved in sports and homework Adam's musical talents and continued interest in comic books and sketching evolved into a desire for integrating and animating his ideas through the medium of film and the manipulation of three dimensional space through sculpture. Despite a film school scholarship offer Adam chose art school where he was able to hone his sculpting and sketching abilities. Still maintaining an interest in films Adam moved to LA and received training in make-up effects.

He started a career working for Stan Winston's doing make-up effects and spent a few years working on movies. Maynard and Adam decided to start a band while keeping their day jobs...the rest is history. It has only been through the last nine years, however, that Adam has begun to explore the full potentials of projecting his thoughts and emotions through Tool's songs, videos, and album artwork. Sometimes in this environment, Adam is able to achieve a state of synesthesia where playing guitar invokes visions and images to appear before him and making videos, sketching, or sculpting creates auditory hallucinations of riffs and music.

Currently Adam is sculpting a piece for the re-release of the Peach album Giving Birth to a Stone, writing music each day for the next Tool album with Danny and Justin, sketching the images he obtains in these practices, and dealing with the business side of the music industry. One way to perceive the experiences that have led to Adam's state in Tool is as the exploration of contrasting modalities of perception. As the hemispheres of the brain struggle for dominance there is a constant shifting of polarity between the right and left lobes that exists as music vs. number, image vs. word, being vs. doing, and holistic integration vs. linear abstraction.