How Keenan is dealing with COVID-19

Q: What was it like to have your plans for the entire year upended?

A: Well, I'm not a delicate flower. You make the adjustment. "OK, well, we can't do that. So what are we gonna do? Are we just gonna take this opportunity to unplug and kind of step back and reevaluate everything?" It was good. I mean, I was still recovering from having gotten COVID at the end of February. I'm still dealing with the residual effects. But it was ugly. I survived it, but it wasn't pretty. So I definitely had to deal with that.

Q: Wow. I didn't realize you had COVID.

A: Um... yeah. I kind of didn't want to run around screaming it. But it's real. And there's after-effects. I had to go through some major medications to undo the residual effects. Still coughing. There's still lung damage.

Q: Oh man, I'm really sorry to hear that.

A: Several of my friends, too. Very not old people, young people, in shape, runners, who contracted it as well. And they're still dealing with some of the after-effects. I lost a few family members.

Q: Man, I'm so sorry to hear all that. Are you feeling all right now?

A: Well no. I still have the cough. Every other day, I have these coughing fits because my lungs are still damaged at the tips. And I just got over the inflammation that was going on with my wrist and hands. I had an autoimmune attack on my system in the form of, like, a rheumatoid arthritis. Basically, from what I understand, it attacks weird spots and it's random. So that's what I got. That was my prize.

Q: That is awful. Well, I guess the fact that you’re releasing the album at a time when you can't really tour doesn't make much of a difference if you wouldn't want to be out touring right now anyway, given what you're going through.

A: Yeah, I mean, if we just knew more. That's always the paradox, right? You want to know more. You want to do things. And then when you go out to find out, you end up being sick (laughs) and having to go home. There's so much information out there, some of it not accurate, so you don't really know how to react. I would love to go out on tour. But I wouldn't want to put my family through that if something awful happened to friends or family because of it.


His thoughts on personal freedoms

Q: I definitely understand that. What appealed to you about the title, “Existential Reckoning"?

A: Well, it was a line in one of the songs. I had another title in mind. But that one felt like it fit more. So I made the adjustment. It was just that downtime that we had to reflect. I was hoping that would actually work to our benefit as a collective, to just kind of look at things better, step back, reevaluate our role and think "How can we make the world better today?" And it didn't really happen (laughs). They all started eating each other. Every conversation — online, especially. When you have the luxury of anonymity, every conversation starts with an argument. There's no, 'Hey, can we all figure this out? Let's figure out what we can do to make the world a better place.' It's just a polarized mess. I thought maybe the lockdown would help people kind of reevaluate and see how we can build rather than fight. Maybe there's still hope. I don't know. I feel like there's hope. Maybe that's because I'm an optimistic pessimist, I guess.

Q: It does seem like we're just more polarized than ever now. People even turn whether or not to wear a mask into reasons to hate each other.

A: Yeah, that's ridiculous. It's just an absurdity. We wear seatbelts. We don't smoke in trains, planes or taxis anymore, or even restaurants. There's reasons for those things. I don't know. I feel like there's this twist on the idea of personal freedom where somehow freedom is you being able to walk into anybody's house and take a dump on their meal or shout ugly things at their grandma. That's not what freedom is. Freedom is the ability to pursue your lifestyle, pursue what you want to do for your family, for your future, what education you want to get. And with that freedom comes a responsibility to look out for yourself, for your neighbor, for your family, for everybody. So there are some compromises that come along with freedom. I'm not sure why that's so difficult to grasp.

Q: Right. There always have been reasonable limits on our freedoms.

A: I don't know. It seems like a simple concept. I have friends that disagree, and we have civil discussions about it. That's what you do. You have civil discussions with the understanding that the idea is that we want the best for everybody. So if we disagree, let's have a conversation about it. If we have the same goal, we should figure out if we're just looking at it from different perspectives.

... It's just an absurdity. We wear seatbelts. We don't smoke in trains, planes or taxis anymore, or even restaurants. There's reasons for those things. I don't know. I feel like there's this twist on the idea of personal freedom where somehow freedom is you being able to walk into anybody's house and take a dump on their meal or shout ugly things at their grandma. ...