Tool – Culling Voices

Song MeaningHaven't you ever had a fight in your head with a facsimile of your significant other, parents or friend? Maybe they did something and you're at work, so you don't have the opportunity to argue with them right now. Or maybe they're passive aggressive and gives you the silent treatment, so you never get a chance to express yourself.

That's an example of what the song means by "Conversations we've never had. Imagined interplay."

And that's the major theme of the song: fighting with the straw man of your own creation in your head.

If you continue to do this for long enough, you start acting upon what the made up version of that person did and said in your head, not based on what the real person did or said. Hence the "guided by them all" in this verse:

"Heated altercations we've never had
so I'm told
Yet guided by them all
Every single one"

The speaker in the song continues to deepen this tendency until they have facsimiles of anyone they disagree with, or possibly even entire groups of people (political parties, even races perhaps):

"Judge, condemn, and banish any and everyone
Without evidence
Only the whispers from within"

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  @DuncanIdahoTPF
  +1

  @DuncanIdahoTPF great analysis. Wasn’t into this song the first few times listening to it but after reading a cohesive thought/interpretation such as yours it really becomes quite an intense song. I think”mental illness” is a shortcut one would take into describing the theme here, it’s a neurosis every single person suffers from, I love the self preservation in this song greatly!! Balance and logic and all the beautiful minutia it incorporates are what I get when I look at this song as a means to defeat the inner turmoil we all make on ourselves.

  Flag TomThumb681on December 29, 2019