American rock climber Alex Honnold successfully scaled one of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, Taipei 101, while listening to Tool.
- READ MORE: Tool talk touring and the timing of new material: “It definitely comes on our own terms”
Over the weekend, Honnold set a new record for the tallest urban free solo in history after scaling the monument without any safety net or ropes, and told Variety the band played an integral role in pacing his climb.
“It was mostly Tool. It’s a random playlist that I made, that I shared with production,” he said of his listening material throughout. “I made it months ago while I was driving. I’ve been training to it a bunch – [it’s] basically, rock music that I’ve liked my whole life.
“Part of the appeal of music is that actually it helps me with pacing. Each bamboo box had been taking me about five to six and a half minutes. I just know how long the songs are. So it gives you a sense of if you’re going fast or slow.”
His high-stakes ascent of the 101-floor tower was completed in just one hour and 31 minutes as part of a live event that aired live on Netflix. The climb took place on Saturday (January 24) after originally being scheduled for the day before but postponed due to bad weather.
Ahead of the climb, Honnold told Netflix’s Tudum that viewers would “probably be on edge watching this,” but hoped viewers would “get a little bit of my joy from the experience – that they can appreciate the fun of it and the beauty of it, the scenery, just the whole experience”.
In the post-climb interview with Variety, Honnold explained that he was never concerned about finishing the climb, though the wind contributed to the fatigue he felt toward the end of it. “I definitely noticed the wind. And then, yeah, I was getting tired a little by the top. I wasn’t concerned that, ‘Oh, I’m so tired. I’m gonna fall off,’” he said. “But I was like, ‘OK, I’m feeling it!’”
As for Tool, Maynard James Keenan and Adam Jones shared an update on any potential new material from the band last year.
“We want to get another record out and play, do what we do. The three of us have been jamming. I don’t know if you go, oh, the writing process has started. It’s always there,” Jones said. “Between preparing for an upcoming tour or whatever we’re doing, there’s points where someone goes, oh, I got this and I got this. But I think we’re going to dive deep soon.”
Previous to that in 2024, Tool’s Justin Chancellor spoke to NME about fans’ fanaticism with the band and whether new material could arrive as a series of singles.
When asked about whether he feels the band are under pressure to create new material, and if they do their creative process on their own terms, he said: “It definitely comes on our own terms. The only pressure comes when we announce that we’re working on something new, because then we have to make our own predictions for when it’ll come out, and obviously you feel like you let people down if you don’t release it in a certain amount of time.
“It’s a nice feeling that people still want new stuff, but also they’ve got to understand that it’s not the easiest thing to do. It’s not a simple thing and it’s not always a natural thing that comes at the time you want it to come. Art is a very strange animal and it has its own schedule.”
