I couldn't give less of a shit about where Maynard stands on the stage, but I also think its lame that he never thanks the audiences like his bandmates do. But you know what? He has multiple projects and revenue streams going on. What do Adam, Danny & Justin have besides the band? It seems like they just have a stronger collective personal investment in it than he does.

Between Maynard getting older, having a family, getting hip surgery, losing his singing abilities and admitting as much and then simply being busy doing other shit I think he just doesn't care that much about the quality of his performances or the investment of energy that he puts into his shows with Tool anymore. Why would he being the perfectionist he is and realizing that he's hitting walls and realizing his limits more frequently? He probably has to detach himself to an extent and just show up. I guess that's his right, but it doesn't make it any less sad to see. Sometimes I think man, if your heart isn't in it anymore that's totally fine -- our passions change -- but then put it to bed, you know?

Also with respect to their song rotation, I agree its stale. No, they don't have a large catalogue of songs to choose from but they have enough that if they wanted to they could keep things fresh night to night and even tour to tour. Pearl Jam takes this approach with their shows and a catalogue ten times the size of Tool's. You never know what the fuck you're going to hear at a PJ show night to night, and I love that. I have no doubt the band would be up to that sort of task -- you hear from concertgoers who throw down for VIP tickets that they will occasionally jam songs for them backstage that they never play live -- but again Maynard is probably the bottleneck in this situation. He picks the setlists, and if the song rotation over the last several tours is any metric to judge by then he's probably eliminated handfuls of them to the point where we're been left with this distilled setlist of about a single concert's worth of greatest hits that can't get whittled down any further.