10 Perfect Hard Rock Songs That Are Ridiculously Long

Making long epics is certainly nothing new when it comes to Tool. Even if some of the song lengths of their tracks feel a bit excessive some of the time, they always have something to say and will take as long as they need to on record to say it. They have gotten sentimental, they have gotten vicious, and on Lateralus, they seem to poke fun at the idea of their own symmetry in song.

Outside of the more rageful songs on this record like Schism or Parabola, the title track has one of the more disjointed sounds of any of its predecessors, having a constantly shifting time signature that makes you unsure of where you should actually be feeling the beat. There's a method to the madness though, as the entire song is based on the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence, down to Maynard James Keenan's melody being broken up by the amount of syllables that are in each line.

When you look past the more gimmick aspect of the time signature, the lyrics also have to do with something a bit more philosophical, equating the Fibonacci spiral to a sort of existential spiral, as Maynard questions how one can move through the cycles of life upon the spiral and still manage to keep their humanity in the process. Their last album Aenema may have just suggested something more cerebral, but listening to all 9 minutes of this song feels like the band are trying to manually open your third eye.