Eat the Elephant is the fourth studio album by American rock band A Perfect Circle. It is their first album release in fourteen years since 2004's Emotive. While early work on new material traces back to as early as 2008, years of slow progress would ensue due to conflict between the band's chief music writers, frontman Maynard James Keenan and guitarist Billy Howerdel, largely stemming from their commitments to other projects and inability to come to an agreement on the direction to take the band. Renewed focus, alongside assistance from music producer Dave Sardy, helped propel the band into much more productive sessions across 2017, with the album being completed in early 2018. Thematically, the album covers a variety of Keenan's views on modern societal, religious, and political issues, focusing on his perceived lack of accountability in humanity. Musically, the album was viewed as an extension and maturation of their rock sound, adding more piano and electronic elements into songs for a more mellow sound than prior albums.
The album was released on April 20, 2018, after four singles were released in advance: "The Doomed" in October 2017, "Disillusioned" in January 2018, "TalkTalk" in February 2018, and "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" in April 2018. The album was generally well received by critics, who praised it for being a successful comeback album, and the maturation in the band's sound, though some lamented the lack of more hard rock songs from band's prior work. The album debuted at number 3 on the US Billboard 200 chart, their fourth album to debut in the top 4 of the chart, and debuted in the top 10 of eight other countries' album charts.
Background A Perfect Circle initially formed in 1999 when Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan, burned out by the band's legal issues in the late 1990s, offered to sing on material that then-guitar tech Billy Howerdel had been writing for his own musical endeavors. The two, with a rotating door of other musicians, recorded and released two platinum selling albums in the US; Mer de Noms in 2000 and Thirteenth Step in 2003, before the two started thinking about taking a hiatus; Keenan to return to Tool, and Howerdel to start a solo career. They ultimately postponed those plans to quickly record a third studio album Emotive, a collection of politically themed cover songs to coincide with 2004 U.S. Presidential Elections. Shortly after its release, without any touring in support of the album, the band entered a hiatus in 2005.
During this time, Keenan returned to Tool to record and release 10,000 Days in 2006, and then began working on his moniker for his solo work - Puscifer starting in 2007. Similarly, Howerdel began work on his own solo album, and released it, Keep Telling Myself It's Alright, under the moniker Ashes Divide, in 2008. The band's fate remained uncertain in this era: it was referred to as in "hiatus or done until further notice" by Howerdel in October 2005, on "life-support" by Keenan in April 2006, and "done for now" by Howerdel in May 2006. Despite this, later in 2008, both Keenan and Howerdel released separate statements that the band was not dead, with Howerdel adding they may reform to work on new material once touring in support of Ashes Divide's album was wrapped up.
Writing and recording Early sessions In December 2008, Keenan first revealed that he and Howerdel had begun writing new material, but that he envisioned it as only being a handful of songs, rather than a full album. Between 2008 and 2010, Howerdel would continue to write material and present it to Keenan; song ideas Keenan approved of would be considered for future release as A Perfect Circle material, while song ideas he had no interest with, would be kept as material for Howerdel to work on alone for a prospective future Ashes Divide album. Howerdel originally had thought that the band would release an album in 2011 or 2012. However, progress was slow during this period, with Howerdel noting that Keenan often responded unexpectedly to the song ideas, and a release did not happen.
The band publicly declared the band's hiatus to be over in June 2010, playing a handful of live shows that year, a full tour in 2011, and a few festival appearances in 2013. While the band continued to work on new music, the only full-song that was finished at the time was the track "By and Down", which they released on the band's greatest hits album, Three Sixty, in 2013. In promoting the releases, Howerdel commented on future releases once again, stating that he felt they had "75% of the foundation of [the next] A Perfect Circle record ready", though he conceded that they were still without Keenan's lyrics or vocal melodies, and could still change depending on Keenan's reaction to the material. Howerdel noted that he felt the material was complete and Keenan could just sing over it, much like they had for the Mer De Noms album, but that Keenan was frequently asking him to rework the material completely, as they did during the making of Thirteenth Step. He also conceded that they still disagreed on the release medium; Keenan preferred smaller releases, while Howerdel preferred the format of a full album. Though the band released little in the way of updates between 2014 and 2016, Howerdel later recounted that the album had been progressing in much the same manner leading up to 2017:
Howerdel later noted that his 2014 writing sessions were particularly prolific, and where he initially wrote the original iterations of the music for a number of Eat the Elephants songs that made the final track list.
Later sessions After the slow, on and off sessions for years, work in earnest on the album began in late 2016, with Keenan free from commitments from Tool, Puscifer, and the busy harvest season for wine-making at his winery, Caduceus Cellars. He reached out to Howerdel, who was available and enthusiastic about dedicating more time to the band, so the two began working on music again, starting with 10-20 ideas Howerdel had accumulated. The official start of the later sessions began in February 2017, For the first time in the band's history, they began working with an outside music producer, Dave Sardy, to help the process along. Sardy helped improve Howerdel's efficiency in the studio, including the management of both physical gear and digital music files, so he could focus more solely on music rather than self-producing. Outside of some initial work, Keenan and Howerdel were rarely working together in the same room; Howerdel worked with Sardy in one studio, while Keenan recorded vocals in his home studio with studio assistance from Puscifer member Mat Mitchel, with the two groups sending their material back and forth electronically through the internet. Despite this, the band retained their prior approach to writing music, with Howerdel writing and demoing musical and instrumental ideas, and Keenan writing vocal melody and lyrics. Sardy helped Howerdel in his approach of presenting music that would appeal to Keenan. Sardy would take songs rejected by Keenan, and mute out many of the "busy" and "layered" elements of the song, stripping it to its basic melody and drum beat; presenting it to Keenan this way allowed him to see how he'd write lyric and melody to the song, allowing them to build the song back up afterwards. Songs such as "TalkTalk" went through many different incarnations due to this process, with the song going through radically different time signatures and tempos.
The track "Eat the Elephant" also went through a number of changes and iterations, originally starting as a song for Howerdel's solo band, Ashes Divide. Howerdel had the song half complete when he was contacted by Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington, who was then working on the band's 2017 album One More Light, a release in which the band decided to co-write with many outside songwriters and music producers. Bennington asked Howerdel to co-write a song with him for the album, and Howerdel accepted, feeling that "Eat the Elephant", at that point, was a song he could see Bennington singing on. The two worked on the song together, but it was ultimately dropped from One More Light, not fitting the pop-oriented sound the album eventually moved into. Howerdel later decided to consider it for A Perfect Circle again; working with Sardy to strip down and rework the demo. Keenan then wrote entirely new lyrics and sang all vocals for the track for the album.
Tracking recording sessions for the album began in mid 2017, were slowed for a few months while the band went on North American tour, and worked resumed for a final intense period over late 2017 and January 2018. As of November, Howerdel reported that 15 songs were in contention for the album, though he conceded that things changed frequently, with some songs, such as "The Doomed" developing quickly out of the blue based on a small idea he presented to Keenan. On January 8, 2018, Howerdel announced that he expected that the recording of the album would wrap up in the following few weeks, stating that progress had been coming along faster than expected, and that "We are certainly past the halfway point and I'd say Maynard James Keenan's probably further along than I am musically. At least with the finished tracks. The songs are there but there's tidying up to do there on some stuff there." Keenan had cancelled his Christmas 2017 plans to stay in Los Angeles to keep working on the album due to the progress that was being made on the album - "The Contrarian", "Disillusioned" and "Eat the Elephant" were all written in a particularly productive 36 hours time-span of writing. The album closer, "Get the Lead Out", was the last song written and recorded for the album, at the end of 2017. The album was finalized and mastered in late January 2018. Howerdel stated that a majority of the songs that made the album's final track list were ones written within the last three years, with one outlier that was considerably older. He also alluded to "a bunch of songs that didn't make it" that would "leave [the band] open for the future". Keenan also alluded to a lot of unused material for the album, though he felt that they would never be released because "there's nothing in them that inspires [him]".
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